


Snow White King

by BleedingInk



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fallen Angels, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, lots of snow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 18:03:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 35,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8170822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingInk/pseuds/BleedingInk
Summary: When she was five years old, Meg Masters got lost in the Moonlit Heights. She was miraculously rescued by a blue-eyed stranger with white hair who warned her never to come back. Twenty years later, in the middle of a crisis due to the loss of her job and the impending end of her relationship, Meg ignores the warning and goes back to the mountain, only to find the one other guest at the charming hostel where she's staying looks exactly like the man who rescued her all those years ago.





	1. Chapter 1

“You know, we have history, these mountains and I.”

The Moonlit Heights had just appeared after a curve of the road, and now they were surrounded by their snowy peaks, rising against the rosy sky. There were pines white from the frost that paraded one after the other outside their window. The soft rocking of the bus and the purring of the motor had lulled most of the passengers to sleep, so they were completely missing the beautiful view. But Meg remained wide awake, with her nose almost pressed against the window, memories she thought buried deep in her head resurfacing like flowers in spring.

“Yeah?” Sam muttered groggily. Meg knew he would much rather prefer to sleep instead of listening of her ramblings, but the closer they go to the town, the more Meg felt the need to ramble.

“My dad brought us here the winter after mom died,” she told Sam. “I think this was the first time I skated. I was five years old.”

“Is that why you chose this place?”

“Yeah,” Meg said. “That and other reasons. Did I ever tell you about the time I was about to die?”

She said it casually, almost like she was asking Sam if she had told him about this hilarious joke already. But her light tone didn’t make his silence any less stunned.

“Meg…”

“I wandered out of our cabin one night,” she told him, because the faster she told the story, the sooner Sam could stop assuming it had been traumatic or terrible or any of the other words he used to mean that he pitied her a little for the life she’d had. “I don’t know why. I think I wanted to see the stars. Anyway, before I knew, I was in the mountains and I had no idea how to go back. I walked for… it must have been hours. I don’t remember much of it, except that it was dark and cold, and I was hungry and scared.”

“But they eventually found you.”

“Yes, obviously.” She rolled her eyes. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here telling you this.”

Sam didn’t say anything, and Meg appreciated that of him. It wasn’t usual for them to be in this peaceful state, in which she could just talk and he didn’t attempt to tell her she was externalizing her traumas and lashing out at the wrong people or whatever. It was in moments like these when Meg remembered why she had allowed him into her very exclusive circle of friends and also into her bed.

“I was so tired I sat by a rock,” she said. She frowned and shook her head. “Or maybe it wasn’t a rock, but a tree. Or perhaps it was a bush. I don’t remember that. I just remembered I laid my back against it and my eyes felt heavy and I figured, if I just rested there for a little while, maybe I could walk back to the town. Maybe even I would wake up and it would be morning and the way would be a lot clearer.”

“You had hypothermia,” Sam pointed out.

“I know that now,” Meg huffed. “Are you going to keep interrupting me to point out the obvious?”

Sam raised his hands in self-defense, probably also signaling he would be quiet from then on. It still took Meg a couple of minutes to remember what she was saying.

“Anyway,” she sighed. “I was falling asleep there and… this guy found me.”

Her voice trailed off. She almost wished Sam would ask something obvious then, something along the lines of: “A rescuer?” because then Meg could say that yes, it had been a rescuer or a ranger or something like that. That this person had picked her up and carried her back to her dad and she didn’t remember much of it except waking up at the hospital the following day.

Except that wasn’t the truth.

“He was… tall,” she began. “I guess to a five year old, everybody seemed tall, but this guy was just seemed to tower like the trees. He was wearing a long black coat, so long it almost went all the way down to the ground. His hands when he picked me up were so cold, cold as ice. And his hair was white. Not like, platinum blonde or anything, I mean white, snow white. He had these big, blue eyes, and I remember looking into them and thinking the sky had got inside them somehow. I think we’ve already established I wasn’t a very smart kid.” She chuckled, but Sam only stared at her with wide eyes. Either he wanted her to continue the story or he just didn’t think her joke was funny. That happened sometimes. “Anyway, he picks me up, and he says with the deepest voice you could ever imagine, he says: ‘ _You shouldn’t be here.’_ ”

She suppressed a shiver. It had been over twenty years since those events, and the details were blurry. Things might not had even happened that way. That was a thing that happened, she had read it somewhere. Memories changed the more you told them, even though this was probably the third time she told that story out loud. The stranger’s face, his hair, his eyes: all of that she could have imagined, she could have filled in the blanks over time.

But his voice was something she knew she would never forget. His voice that had resonated like thunder in her ears, like an avalanche rolling down the mountains. His voice and his words would haunt her to the very day she died.

“I don’t know… I think I said something along the lines of ‘ _I’m sorry, I got lost_ ’. Or maybe I didn’t say anything,” she continued, trying to drown out the memories and rush to the end of it. “Either way, it was a strange conversation to have there. I think it had begun snowing, because I remember the shoulders of his coat being white while he carried me away. I don’t know how long we walked, but I was shaking and very, very scared.”

“Why were you shaking?” Sam asked, frowning. “Didn’t he wrap you in his coat or something?”

“He might have.” Meg shrugged. “Maybe I had been out in the cold too long to feel the difference. Either way, he walked with me and suddenly there was… orange. Bright orange over the snow, and voices calling my name. He put me down and said: ‘ _Go to them. Don’t come back here_ ’. When I turned around to look at him, to thank him… he was gone. So I did what he said: I ran towards the voices, and one of the rangers spotted me. I don’t remember much after that, except being covered in several blankets and people offering me hot chocolate… that might have been a little later. But anyways, yeah… that’s what happened.”

She stared out of the window for a long while more, waiting for Sam’s commentary, waiting for him to tell her that wasn’t possible, that she was either making it up or remembering everything wrong. And she was ready to admit perhaps he was right. Perhaps the stranger in the mountain hadn’t ever existed at all.

Or perhaps it was just something no one could explain. Meg wasn’t religious or superstitious at all, she had never prayed in her life and she walked under ladders like it was no one’s business. She didn’t believe in ghosts or demons or anything of the sort. She believed the universe was something concrete, that she could touch and see and smell and taste and hear. So a mysterious man with vanishing abilities didn’t fit at all with her understanding of the universe.

Except that she remembered the texture of his coat and the color of his eyes. Sometimes, in her deepest dreams, she remembered his voice, repeating his warning in that voice that sounded a lot like the rustle of the wind on the naked branches of a tree. And in those moments, she could believe he had been real, maybe he was real still.

She didn’t tell that to Sam. She didn’t tell him she had dreamed about him repeatedly while they were planning that trip. She didn’t tell him she was telling him all about that because maybe saying it out loud, maybe someone else assuring her that was a ridiculous story and a figment of her imagination, maybe it would take away his power. Maybe she disobeying her savior wouldn’t have any weight on her life if someone else, someone smart and loyal like Sam, simply denied his existence.

But Sam couldn’t even do that right.

“There are stories about angels,” he said, very slowly. “Guardian angels that help people in life or death situations. They all say they were in great danger and these strangers showed up to save them, and when they looked again, they had disappeared and nobody else had seen them. But they swear up and down they were there. Others said there were the voices or the presence of beloved people who had passed that kept them going or helped them stay calm…”

“Ah, come on,” Meg groaned. “Don’t tell me you believe that mumbo-jumbo.”

“It might be a psychological thing,” Sam replied, raising his hands up like he thought Meg was going to punch him for even suggesting something like that. “In extremes situations, your mind might make up something like that to ensure you survive. But you know… there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of by your philosophy.”

“Shut up, Hamlet.” Meg rolled her eyes at him and turned to the window once more. The bus took a turn and the town of Moonlit Heights appeared before them. It was too late to back down now, so Meg lifted up her chin in defiance. “Whatever the case, I’m here now. If he wants to come and introduce himself, that’s fine by me.”

Sam chuckled, though Meg failed to see what was funny.

 

* * *

 

Moonlit Heights, Maine, had a grand total of three hundred inhabitants, a little more during winter season. The bus left them by a road surrounded by pine trees and they had to walk for about fifteen minutes bags and all before they saw the first house flanking the main street. Which, to be fair, was the only street that seemed to matter there. Not many folks had cars, apparently, and they were all busy shoving the snow from their front yards to pay much attention to the couple of tourists trying to find the place where they’d be staying. Looking around, it could barely be called a town; in Meg’s opinion, it was little more than glorified hamlet. But at least it knew it was and the prizes reflected that.

And that was exactly what she needed: a cheap, isolated place, away from curious glances and well-meaning friends that got in her way more often than they helped her. The only reason she’d brought Sam along was because sex was a key part of her healing process. She knew he would roll his eyes if she told him that, but it didn’t make it any less true.

The hostel was at the end of the street, almost near the zone of the frozen lake began. They reached it gasping and puffing after the long walk, and they dropped the bags for a second in front of the gate. Meg looked at it with a critical eye; after all, she had stayed on everything from rundown motels to five star hotels.

This place seemed to be somewhere in the middle. It was a simple construction painted in blue and white, with a gabled roof and a chimney that both looked white under the frost that had landed on it. The black gate around the garden was more of a decoration and a place in where to hang the name: “Snow Angels Hostel”.

Despite the terrible name, Meg found herself instantly in love with the place. Sam, not so much.

“It… it looks a little rustic,” he commented. “Did it say there was Wi-fi connection? I don’t remember…”

“What do you need Wi-fi for? We came to rest, you obsessive workaholic.”

Sam scrunched up his face like he did when he was deeply offended, but before he could argue anything else, a short blonde girl opened the door and stared at them with big blue eyes.

“Hello,” Meg said. “Uh… is your mom around?”

“Are you Mr. and Mrs. Masters?” the little girl asked, with the seriousness of a grown woman conducting her business.

“We’re… yeah, we are,” Meg said, because that was easier than explaining they weren’t actually married and that the reservations were under her name.

The girl’s expression changed instantly: it went from professional curiosity to a warm, welcoming smile. She stepped outside and opened the gate for them.

“I like your hat,” she told Meg.

Now, as a general rule, Meg disliked children. She thought they were this annoying, awful things that demanded near constant attention and sucked you dry of the money you worked so hard to gain. That was one of the biggest disagreements she had with Sam: she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to have one of those little leeches, much less two or three of them.

But she wasn’t heartless. And she could always make an exception for cute, educated kids.

“Thank you,” she replied with a smile. "I like your jacket. Purple's my favorite color."

Claire's missing tooth gave her face an even cuter aspect.

"Claire!" a voice came from inside the house, and a second later, a woman with a panicked expression appear on the door. The minute her eyes set on Claire, she relaxed her shoulders and gave out a relieved sigh. "Claire, how many times have I told you not to open the door to strangers?"

"They're the Masters, mom," Claire explained.

The woman was also blonde, but she didn't have the same striking blue eyes. She grabbed her daughter's hand in a way that definitely indicated they were going to talk about their behavior later and smile at Meg.

"I'm sorry," she said, extending her hands. "I'm Amelia Novak: I'm the owner. Please, come in."

The inside of the hostel was just as lovely as the exterior. It was warm and cozy, with wooden panels covered in paintings and armchairs placed in front of a chimney. There was a small plastic Christmas tree in a corner, even though they were already in the middle of January. The glittering of its tiny golden lights only added to the charm of the place.

"We have cocoa nights for our guests here ever Friday," Amelia commented as she guided them to the counter. "So if you'd like to join us, you're welcomed to."

"That sounds nice," Meg said, as she signed her name on the check-in notebook. "How many guests are there staying here?"

Amelia's cheeks blushed furiously.

"Well, counting you... three people in total," she stammered. And as if she was ashamed to admit how slow business was, she quickly added: "But we expect more will arrive in the next few weeks."

“Of course,” Meg said, though it was pretty safe to say that Amelia’s hostel had never seen a full house before. She must have realized what her guests were thinking, because she changed the topic:

“So, are you two on a honey moon?”

“Hell, no,” Meg said quickly, and she figured this was a good time as any to disavow the notion that they were married: “We’re just… together.”

That seemed like a good description, and Sam nodded to agree with it.

“Sorry, do you happen to have Wi-fi?” he asked. Meg wanted to hit him because, seriously? They’d just go there.

“The computer has a dial up modem and guests are welcomed to use it for as long as they need to,” Amelia replied with a smile, as if she was announced she counted with state-of-the-art technology. The computer, almost abandoned in the corner, looked like a fairly old model, maybe even second hand, and honestly it just seemed so out of place in the cozy little room. A full bookshelf might have been more appropriate for the ambient.

“Oh,” Sam said, and Meg could already see his tech-addicted ass preparing to ask why they didn’t have Wi-fi.

“It doesn’t matter!” she said before he could say anything. “Because we’re not going to need it, are we, Sammy?”

Sam winced at the nickname, but he tried to keep his cordial tone.

“Yes… I mean, of course… there’s no trouble…”

Never had Meg met someone who was a worse actor. Even Amelia realized how much he was lying.

“Well, I think Ellen’s bar has Wi-fi, but I’m not sure,” she said. She seemed a little disappointed that Sam was even asking that. “It’s kind of hard to get a good signal up here, but you could definitely ask her. The Roadhouse is just down he street…”

“Yeah, we passed by it on our way here,” Meg said, just because she wanted Amelia’s rambling to stop and Sam to quit making her awkward. “We might go right now. We haven’t had lunch.”

“Oh, that’s great.” Amelia smiled at them, like she was relieved they could change the topic and handed them the key to their room. “Well, I hope you enjoy your stay!”

“Thank you!”

They dragged their bags to the bottom of the stairs and looked up.

“I don’t supposed they have an elevator, right?”

“Stop complaining and start climbing,” Meg said, dryly.

It wasn’t like their bags were that heavy anyway, but judging from Sam’s face, one would have thought they weighed a ton. Meg was already getting irritated at him because, goddammit, she had gone there to rest and get better, she didn’t need him being negative all over her fun.

“What is it?” Sam asked when they were finally standing on the second floor.

“What is it with what?”

“You’re angry for something. What is it?”

“Nothing,” Meg lied, fixing her eyes on the doors in front of them. “Which one is ours?”

Sam opened his mouth like he wanted to keep poking her, but ultimately he decided the best thing for his own good was to keep quiet.

“Apparently it’s further down,” he said. “I’ll look for it, you stay here with the bags.”

“Yes, I think that’s best.”

Sam glanced at her one last time and then walked away, looking at the key and then at the doors from time to time, like he hadn’t memorize the number at all. Meg kept her glare fixed on the back of his neck. If he didn’t want to come, why the hell hadn’t he just said so? Why did he wait until they were already fucking there to start huffing and puffing like a little kid? He was so frustrating sometimes, Meg just wanted to…

The door from the room to the left burst open. A gust of wind washed over, making her shiver despite all her clothes. She turned to tell the other guest to close the stupid window, they were in the mountains in the winter, for fuck’s sake. But when her eyes fell on him, the words and the curses died in her mouth.

It was _him_.

He looked a little different. He was wearing a navy sweater vest and jeans, his hair was black instead of white. But the eyes behind the thick framed glasses were the same striking blue she remembered, the blue that had made her think of a sunny sky in the middle of a dark, cold night.

She looked into those eyes and there was no doubt in her pounding heart, in her fluttering stomach, in her trembling knees, that she was right.

It was him. Her stranger in the mountain.

No, it couldn't be him. That had been twenty years ago, he couldn't be the same man. He looked far too youthful, far too neat, far too...

... hostile. The look he was giving her from behind his glasses, with a furrow between his eyebrows, his lips parted like he was offended or indignant about something, was nothing like the kind face she remembered.

But when he spoke, his gruff voice and his words made her hesitate on the edge of faith once more:

"You shouldn't be here."


	2. Chapter 2

Meg wasn't proud to admit it took her more than five seconds to gather herself enough to muster an answer.

"I'm sorry, what did you just say?"

"You shouldn't be here," the man repeated, slower and louder this time, like he thought Meg she was a small, hypersensitive child. "Why are you here?"

Her heart still pounded hard in her chest, but this time it was for entirely different reasons. Her cheeks burned with rage, and suddenly, all the annoyance she had felt for Sam was entirely transferred to this stranger. This stranger who was wearing the face of her stranger, but that was most definitely not him.

"I'm here 'cause it's a free country, pal," she said, irritated. "In fact, now that you say it, there's absolutely no reason for me not to be here. I want to be here even more now that you said that."

She had the satisfaction of watching his face contort in surprise before the hostile look returned in full force.

"Regardless, you shouldn't be here," he insisted. "You have to leave immediately."

"Oh, yeah?" Meg asked, too angry to notice just how weird it was what this guy was saying. "Why don't you make me?"

"I might just," the guy said, taking a step towards her. Meg shuddered under the cold breeze, and what the hell was this maniac doing with the window open in a weather like that, goddammit?

"Well, I'm a paying costumer as much as you are," she pointed out. "So good luck with that."

He opened his mouth like he was going to argue something else or just say that she shouldn't be there like a fucking broken record, but a voice came floating at them from downstairs:

"Castiel! Is there a problem?"

A second later, Amelia appeared by their side, with Claire hiding behind her leg. She stared at them with curious wide eyes, not even trying to hide the fact she had been totally listening in their conversation. They must have been speaking louder than Meg had thought.

The guy (Castiel, Amelia had called him Castiel, and oh, God, was that a ridiculous name, but also so ridiculously appropriate) looked at her sheepishly, but his tone was considerably less harsh when he spoke:

"You didn't tell me there were more people coming."

"Yes, well, sorry," Amelia said, and to Meg's satisfaction, she didn't exactly look sorry. "I don't have to inform you of every client that decides to make a reservation."

Castiel opened his mouth and closed it again, like a fish that suddenly found itself outside of the water. Meg smirked at him, not even trying to hide how much she was enjoying that small humiliation. No, she didn't care if it was petty. The guy had brought it upon himself for being so rude and weird.

"Well... you better stay away from me," he warned Meg in the end.

"Gladly," Meg replied as he spun on his heels and marched back into his room. "And close your freaking window, you weirdo!"

"It is closed!" he replied, before slamming the door behind him.

That had probably been one of the childish, most nonsensical things Meg had done in her adult life. And judging by the look on Amelia's face, she had also realized how out there the whole thing was.

"Do you two... know each other?" she asked.

"No, first time I see him in my life," Meg admitted.

Well, that was not quite true. But after that display, she was now absolutely, one hundred percent, certain that he couldn't be the man that had rescued her all those years ago.

Well, maybe ninety eight percent certain.

"Because you sounded like... I don't know," Amelia said. "I figured maybe you used to be friends or..."

"Castiel doesn't have any friends," Claire intervened.

With that attitude, Meg wasn't too shocked at the revelation.

"Hey," Sam called, reappearing at the other end of the hall. "Everything alright?"

"Yes," Meg said, curtly, grabbing her suitcase and dragging it past him. "Everything's peachy."

Sam had been kind enough to leave the door of their room open, and Meg was a bit thankful for that. It would have been really uncomfortable to make that dramatic exit only to roam the halls of the motel without a clear idea of where she should leave her shit.

She didn't even have time to take in the room when she turned around and found Amelia had followed them in with the excuse of helping them with a bag (although Sam still had picked up the heaviest one).

"You'll have to excuse Castiel," she told her. "He's one of my oldest clients. He comes to stay every winter because he's a painter and he says the mountains inspire him. He's... a little eccentric, but he's not bad. I don't know what got into him today."

She seemed very worried, as if she was expecting Meg to scream at her and tell her to leave her alone and that she and Sam would be taking their business elsewhere. But if there was one thing Meg could never resist was a challenge, and Castiel, in her mind, had practically challenged her to stay there.

"Don't sweat it," she told Amelia. “I’m used to dealing with assholes.”

Amelia paled at that comment.

“Oh, no, please, he’s actually very sweet and…”

“It’s just an expression,” Meg clarified, although in her mind the way Castiel had treated her was far from being sweet. “Really, don’t worry about it. We probably won’t even run into each other again. The town is big enough for the two of us.”

Amelia didn’t seem very convinced, but she nodded. She muttered something about leaving them to unpack and walked away… without realizing she was leaving her daughter behind.

“Do you need anything, little one?” Meg asked.

“What’s an asshole?”

“Well, an asshole is…”

“Hey, Claire, I think I heard your mom calling,” Sam intervened. “Why don’t you go see what she wants?”

“Okay!”

She bounced away and Sam closed the door behind her. Meg started laughing, but Sam’s expression made it very clear he wasn’t as amused as she was.

“What?” she asked. Sam crooked an eyebrow. “Oh, come on, she’s going to have to learn it sooner or later.”

“Please, do not corrupt the owner’s daughter,” he said. “And I don’t know what you did to get on that guy’s bad side, but…”

“Why do you assume I did something?” Meg asked, offended. “Seriously! He decided to hate me out of the blue…”

Sam raised his hands, in a clear sign that he didn’t want to have that conversation right then. But he had started it, so the least he could do was finish it.

“I’ve never even seen the guy in my life!” Meg insisted.

A tug in the back in the back of her mind indicated her that she wasn’t being completely honest again, but she wasn’t going to tell Sam about that. She was pretty sure he already thought she was crazy for dropping everything and coming to that little godforsaken town in the middle of the mountains.

“Look, just… stay out of trouble,” he concluded. “I’m going to take a shower.”

“Want me to join you?” Meg offered.

But Sam must have been pretty pissed, because he slammed the bathroom’s door instead of answering her. That was no fun. Meg was going to have to get him to forgive her (even though she literally had done _nothing_ ) if she wanted to have a fun night later on. She could always just take her clothes off and barge in, but honestly, she wasn’t in the mood either.

The room was just as welcoming and pretty as the other things in the hostel. The carpet and the walls were different shades of beige; perhaps in an attempt to make the place seem warmer. There were a couple of paintings hanging around, but Meg wasn’t really interested in art, so she paid no mind to them. The mattress, however, deserved her undivided attention. It was so soft she sank in it when she sat. Sleeping on it must have felt like sleeping on a fluffy cloud. Meg sighed deeply and closed her eyes, but she still had too much leftover energy to take a nap.

She opened the white curtains instead, and she was greeted by one of the most spectacular sights she could have ever asked for: the mountains extended far and wide, their tips snowed in so they were a mass of dark violet and white against the clear sky. The cold air cut sharply inside her lungs, but Meg wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

And right at the bottom of the mountains, there was the things she had come there for: the frozen lake, like a blue stain on the ground, seemed to be beckoning to her.

She absolutely destroyed Sam’s careful packing when she revolved it looking for her skates, but she found it hard to give a damn. He was already mad at her for no reason, so at least this time he would have one. She found a block and left a note, just in case he cared to find out where she had gone, and then she sprinted out of the room without looking back.

“The lake? Yes, Bobby Singer takes people up there in his van,” Amelia told her when she asked. “You might be a little late, even if you leave now, so maybe you could wait until tomorrow…”

“No need,” Meg replied. “Just tell me how to get to him and I’ll find him.”

“Oh… okay,” Amelia frowned, confused. “You don’t want to wait for your boyfriend?”

“He was tired.”

What she really wanted to say was that she never understood why people thought just because they were together she had to be attached by the hip to Sam. Honestly, if that were the case, she might have murdered him outright a long time ago. And then she would have to walk around with his corpse hanging from her hip.

Bobby Singer didn’t understand why she was laughing, and Meg had the impression he wouldn’t get the joke even if she explained it to him. He was an old, bearded man, with an expression so serious she doubted he’d ever laughed in his life. People were already boarding the van, and he was about to climb up on the driver’s seat when Meg arrived.

“Sorry,” she said, trying to show him her most convincing smile. “Hi, I’m Meg Masters, I’m staying at the Snow Angels. Amelia gave me your name, said you could take me to the lake.”

“I can,” Bobby Singer replied. “Don’t mean I will. We’re full for today…”

“Wait, did you say Meg Masters?”

Meg had no idea where that blonde teenage girl came from, except that she jumped down from the top of the van and landed on her feet right beside her. There was frost on her hat and the shoulders of her coat, and it took her a second to understand she had been up there putting the bags in order.

“Are you really Meg Masters?” she asked, her dark eyes glimmering. “ _The_ Meg Masters?”

“Is there another one?” Meg joked.

“Is she someone I should know about?” Bobby asked at the same time.

“Dad, she’s an Olympic athlete,” the girl told him, with an exasperated huff, as if she though Bobby was being obtuse on propose. “She has two golden medals in figure skating.”

“Three,” Meg corrected her. “But, who’s counting?”

“We have to take her up to the lake,” the girl insisted. “Please, she can sit on the front with me, please!”

Bobby seemed disgruntled by this turn of events, but soon it became clear he couldn’t say no to anything his daughter asked.

“Fine,” he groaned. “But I’m charging her the full prize.”

He walked away muttering something under his breath. Meg smiled at the girl.

“Thank you for that.”

“You’re very welcome,” she said, extending her hand towards her. “Hi, I’m Jo Harvelle. Excuse my stepdad; he’s a grumpy old turtle who lives inside of his shell.”

“I heard that,” Bobby said.

He gave Meg a plastic wristband and collected the fifteen bucks for the excursion. Then he made a gesture for them to get up and didn’t speak a word in the entire trip. His stepdaughter more than made up for that by talking nonstop for the twenty minutes it lasted.

“It’s very weird that someone comes to the town. Someone important, I mean. People come, but they’re mostly old folks who want to fish in the ice. Some years ago a guy tried to install a skiing complex, but it didn’t last. The mountains are too hostile.”

Meg liked that expression, for some reason. It sounded like something out of a story, or a poem: “The mountains are too hostile”. Like they had a will of their own that humans couldn’t comprehend.

“Anyway, it’s so great that you came. Are you going to be staying long? Did you come to practice? Oh, oh, did Oskar come with you?”

“No,” Meg said. She didn’t want to talk about that, but she figured the sooner she satisfied Jo’s curiosity, the sooner they could move on to another, more pleasant topic. “Oskar and I are no longer partners.”

Jo’s eyes shot open.

“Oh, I have read about the rumors, but I didn’t know if they were true! That’s a shame though, you two made a great team. Are you going to skate on your own now?”

“I haven’t really thought about it…”

“Because I think you totally could,” Jo interrupted her. “You always seem so graceful, really, how do you manage to move so elegantly? It’s like you’re dancing on the ice.”

“I… used to study ballet before I got into skating,” Meg said, pretty certain that would be the cue for Jo to go on another verbose rambling.

“Of course! It really shows; you have a good posture. I used to go ballet, too, but then mom married Bobby and we moved here. It’s okay, though, Pamela lives here. She used to do artistic gymnastics and she’s been training me…”

She went on and on about the competitions she wanted to enter, and how she hoped she wouldn’t be too old to compete in the Olympics the following year or the next one, but she needed to collect the money and…

Meg stopped paying attention to her rambling, nodding and and saying things like "Oh, really?" now and then when in fact she was far more interested looking over Jo's shoulder at the white road, the leafless trees with ice stalactites hanging from their branches, the weak winter sun giving everything a silvery glow. Meg loved the winter, and if it was up to her, she would move to a place where it was perpetual. Like Iceland or Alaska or the Russian Siberia. Actually the Siberia would be ideal, because then she could indulge in what Sam called “her antisocial tendencies”, like not talking for hours on end or being grumpy whenever she wanted to be.

She started wondering, if he had so many things to complain about her, why was he with her at all. But that was a gloomy thought she didn’t want to follow through, so she discarded it in favor of leaning towards the dashboard to get a better look at the mountains.

She was very glad she did: the road took a turn, and right around it, there was the lake. It was a large body of water formed by the snow that melted down on the summer and pooled down there, and she imagined it must have been an impressive sight in the summer, its dark, deep waters waving underneath the sun. But in winter, it was a bright grey spot, firm enough that people could bring their chairs, cut holes into it and fish, or walk across… or skate even.

Meg’s hands tingled with anxiety at the idea of putting on her skates again and do what she did best. And apparently, Jo was thinking the same thing.

“Oh, you could teach me some moves!” she said, putting her hands together almost as if she was praying. “I would love to learn. I’m pretty fast, but I don’t have the…”

“Jo, for God’s sake.” Bobby spoke for the first time in the entire trip. “Would you leave the woman alone?”

Jo rolled her eyes, but it seemed the chastisement had got to her.

“Or perhaps you would rather I get out of your hair,” she said, her eyes downcast a little. “I totally get it if you do, you probably want to train by yourself. That’s what you came here for, didn’t you?”

“Hell no.” Meg shook her head. “I came to have some fun, and how am I supposed to do that if I imagine a group of ugly old men putting a number on my movements?”

Jo burst into laughter at that statement, and all her sudden shyness melted away like snowball in the sun.

Bobby parked next to a little wooden cabin and announced everyone had to leave the van and they were individually responsible for their items if they forgot them there. A black haired woman came out of the cabin and greeted him with a smile. She was wearing a thick jacket and had a badge on the left side of her chest.

“Hello, Singer,” she said. “And Jo.”

Bobby groaned, took a lawn chair and sat down next to the cabin’s door with a book he extracted from the depths of his coat. That seemed to be common place, because the woman wasn’t fazed at all by his rudeness.

“Jody!” Jo greeted her, and with an enthusiasm Meg was beginning to suspect was a source of perpetual energy, she lunged herself towards Jody and hugged her. “So good to see you!”

“Good to see you too, kiddo,” Jody replied. “Good fishing today, huh?”

She probably meant the tourist, who had already started walking around, taking pictures or just staring open-mouthed at the Moonlit Heights.

“Where are all these people staying?” Meg wondered, not expecting to hear any particular answer to that. Amelia had said she, Sam and that one other weirdo were the only guests she had, but there was at least a dozen people who clearly didn’t live in the town.

“On Rotham, down the road,” Jody explained. “It’s a bigger town and it has a bigger hotel, but they still have to come here if they want to come up the lake.”

Meg had read about that other town, and she reckoned Sam would have liked to stay there instead. They probably had Wi-fi on every single corner or something like that. But it was his fault for leaving the reservation process in her hands. What did he expect? The lonelier the place, the better, in her opinion.

“Oh, Jody, you’re not going to believe who she is,” Jo said.

Meg doubted Jody knew or care, and the ranger obviously thought the same thing, because she raised a palm up to keep Jo from speaking. She blew a whistle with a sound so acute Meg ended gritting her teeth and scratching her ears.

“Hello, everybody, I’m Ranger Mills,” she introduced herself. “I welcome you to the Moonlit Lake. Now a few safety precautions if you’re going to fish on the ice…”

She started giving a number of rules, but Jo must have heard them all before, because she grabbed Meg by the arm and dragged her away from there to a cordoned off zone. A yellow sign with a black skating figure hanged from a tree nearby, with a pew that seemed to have been stolen from a church where people could sit to take off their shoes.

“Here we go,” Jo said, with a glimmer in her eye. “I’ll go rent some skates from Jody, but you can go ahead.”

She didn’t have to tell Meg twice.

The moment the blade of her skate grazed the ice for the first time, it was like all her problems vanished in the cold, thin air. She didn’t have to think about Sam, or Oskar, or that bitch Rowena. She didn’t have to think about weird guys with strangely familiar eyes that hated her for no reason. There was only her, and the open space around her, the sky far above her head and the ice beneath her feet.

She made a tentative round, trying to get an idea of the distance and the space she had to maneuver. It was like a small rink, really, but she could work with it. And there was no one around to see her, so she didn’t have to worry about looking perfect or pretty. Her breathing became naturally calm, and her heart pounded in her chest, like every cell in her body was anticipating the exercise she was about to make.

She started with some basic spins to warm up, because only then she realized it was going to be very hard to put her legs up in the air with the jeans she was wearing. Very well thought out, but then again, when had she ever thought something through? Enough warming up. She gained speed and jumped in the air, managing two whole rotations before she landed. Not bad, but she could do better.

She skated to the other side, and took impulse. She wasn’t dancing to any particular music, but in her head, there was a soft, slow melody, a melody that didn’t rush her, that let her take her time to get to the place where she needed to be, that let her enjoy the simple fact that she was moving, that her body responded to her so effortlessly and there was no one to stop her or correct her. She could have closed her eyes and just enjoy the wind in her face, but she still needed to see where she was going.

And she would’ve missed all people watching her performance, rating her not with numbers but with applause. Meg turned around surprised, only to find Jo, Ranger Mills and a bunch of the other tourist (some of them with their own skates around their necks) clapping at her. Meg smiled and waved her hand, unsure of long they had been standing there. It mattered very little. If they wanted to see something really good, she was definitely going to show them.

She spun on the ice, going faster and faster, gyrating on one foot and slowly lowering the rest of her body. Her hat flew away and her hair, now free, got into her eyes, but she was too concentrated stretching her hands towards her extended leg. She finally reached the position and held it for several seconds until she felt her spinning slowing down. She had to go back up, before she lost momentum, before the white and grey world around her stopped and she ended up face first in the ice, disappointing her public.

The muscles from her leg tensed when she got up suddenly, without any of the patience she had used to crunch down. The impulse sent her flying through the air, too high, far too high, and she heard the gasps from the people far away, like they knew the same thing she knew. She was losing control. She could feel it midair, while her body was still spinning. She had jumped too high, and the fall would be too harsh on her ankles, unless…

She thought faster than gravity could act on her. She stretched her leg and arms to recover her balance, and when she landed, she was ready. The blade bit the ice with a little too much force, but she leaned her body forward (not waving her arms, she couldn’t wave her arms like a pathetic beginner who didn’t know how to keep her balance) and used the leftover impulse to slowly slide backwards until she could safely stop.

Goddammit, she deserved another medal just for doing that jump without breaking something. What she got instead was loud cheering and thunderous clapping, and that was almost as good. She didn’t need a numeric score, the admiration and happiness which with her performance was received was more than enough to remind her what she loved about skating. Despite it all, despite the fighting and the ugliness and the people telling her she was growing too old for her job, she still had it.

She waited until the world got still before she turned to the people in the lake’s shore and took a deep bow with a smirk upon her lips. She saw Jo clapping to her heart’s content and Ranger Mills smiling. Except that Ranger Mill’s expression turned worried with the speed of lightning. She shouted something Meg didn’t get to hear over the loud cracking coming from beneath.

Ihe firm ice in which Meg was standing disappeared, as if someone had pulled a rug from underneath her feet. The cold, dark waters of the lake were waiting to swallow her down.


	3. Chapter 3

“Oh, my God! What happened?”

Meg wasn’t sure how to answer to Amelia’s question while Bobby Singer and Jody Mills ushered her through the door. She could say she had just spent several horrible, anguishing seconds underwater, as ice slid down her throat and needles prickled her all over her body. She could say she had tried holding on to the ice only for her hands to slide away and for her to sink again until she had found two helping hands that had pulled her up, dragged her to the ranger’s cabin and covered her in warm blankets until she could barely see. She could say she had spent several minutes shaking and arguing with Ranger Mills through chattering teeth that no, she didn’t need to go to a hospital, she wasn’t going to die from hypothermia, she just needed to go home (well, to Amelia’s home anyway) and stayed by the fire until the frost in her hair melted away and she stopped feeling like there was no more warmth left in the world and winter itself had taken roots in her bones.

In the end, she had got away with hers, but judging by Amelia’s horrified expression, she probably should have taken the ride to the hospital Ranger Mills had offered instead of frightening the poor woman with her appearance.

But all of that was too hard to explain, and even though she no longer had to grit her teeth to keep them from moving, she still didn’t feel like talking.

Ranger Mills was kind enough to do it for her.

“Amelia, the fireplace, please…”

“Y-yes!” Amelia stuttered. “Right away!”

That was much better. Meg snuggled on the armchair and hid herself in the nest of dry blankets they had given her. She could vaguely hear Bobby and Jody’s voices as they explained to Amelia everything that had went down and what they thought she should do. It didn’t matter. She was going to be fine. It wasn’t like it was the first time she had been about to freeze to death.

Her head lolled to the side, and through barely opened eyes, she saw Castiel standing at the lobby’s door. His hair was a little greyer now, like he had aged several years in just a matter of hours. His face remained just like she had seen it though: with a frown between his eyebrows and his lips twisted in a gesture of confusion.

“What do you want?” she groaned.

He was far away and she had spoken in a soft whisper, so she hadn’t really thought he would understand what she said. But a second later, he was kneeling in front of her, observing her with those impossibly blue eyes. Meg shuddered. She hadn’t seen him walking towards her.

“I told you not to come here,” he said. “Why did you?”

He sounded frustrated, as if Meg was a child that refused to follow a simple instruction. In any other circumstances, Meg would have given him a biting answer, but she didn’t think he was going to accept it.

“I wanted to come,” she said. “We have history, these mountains and I.”

She had told Sam the same thing, but somehow she didn’t think he had understood it completely. Castiel, however, stretched his hand to touch her temple, something between a caress and a search for confirmation. Confirmation to what, exactly, Meg couldn’t tell. But he looked sad, so incredibly sad when he looked up at her again.

“You felt lost,” he said. “And you wanted to come here, because the last time you were lost, I found you and brought you home.”

“I’ve never seen you before,” Meg muttered, and deep down, she knew that was a lie.

“I can’t do that for you again.” Castiel continued talking as if Meg hadn’t said a word. “What’s more, you might be in great danger by staying here. Leave. You must leave at once.”

“Are you threatening me, pal?” Meg said, a lazy rush of anger making her cheeks burn. “Because, let me tell you, I don’t scare that easy.”

“I don’t mean to scare you or threaten you, Meg Masters,” Castiel replied. She figured it was pointless to ask how he knew her last name. “I’m just giving you a warning.”

“Meg!”

Meg startled awake. She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she must have, because her eyes felt heavy and her neck was aching from the awkward position. Sam was by her chair, towering above her instead of crouching down like Castiel had done. She looked around, but even before she did that, she knew he wouldn’t be there.

“What the hell?” Sam asked. “The ranger said you skated too close to the thin ice. Weren’t you paying attention? You could’ve got seriously injured!”

She didn’t like his tone. He sounded too much like he was accusing her of causing her own accident, so she immediately went into defensive move.

“Oh, yes, I was paying attention,” she said, wryly. “This was exactly the result I wanted: an impromptu swim lesson in which I could have frozen to death or died of hypothermia.”

Her nest of blankets was no longer comfortable, so she stood up. Except her legs had gone numb and thousands of little ants suddenly awoke to run up and down them. She feared her knees might not hold her and she would have to hold on to Sam for support, but luckily for her, she managed to stay firm.

“Meg, come on!” Sam insisted, as Meg staggered past him and towards the stairs. “Meg, that was really reckless! You should have taken me with you, you should’ve waited…”

“And what? Was your presence somehow going to make the ice thicker?” Meg shot back. “Or did I deprive you of the chance of riding to rescue poor stupid Meg like a white knight?”

“That is not what I meant at all!” Sam said. They were on top of the stairs now, and he was saying something else, but Meg wasn’t paying attention. She was looking at Castiel’s door intently, wondering if she should drag him out and demand an explanation.

Because it hadn’t been a dream, had it? The ghost of his touch still lingered on her forehead, she could still hear his voice with clarity ringing in her ears. She had to find out.

“What are you doing?” Sam asked when she started knocking. “Meg, what the hell?”

Meg ignored him.

“Hey, I know you’re in there!” she shouted. “Come out, I need to ask you something!”

“Why are you…? Meg, listen, I’m sorry this happened, but you need to calm down…”

The door opened and the temperature immediately dropped. Not only because Castiel’s eyes were gelid as he fixed them on Meg, but it literally dropped a couple of degrees, not enough to be too noticeable, but she did get cold and began shuddering again. Irrationally, it occurred to her it had something to do with his presence. Like he had some sort of strange control on the air around him.

“I was very busy,” he said, taking off his glasses as if that way Meg could get the full force of his anger in his glare. “And I don’t appreciate interruptions of my work. So if you need to tell me something, better make it quick.”

If it had been any other person uttering those words (and a person Meg was mad at on top of it), she would have either mocked them or screamed at that person. With Castiel, she got the feeling doing neither of those things would be wise, so she cut to the chase.

“I’m not leaving.”

To her satisfaction, Castiel startled a little bit at her words, but his face immediately turned indifferent and irritated again.

“And?” he asked. “You said it yourself, this is a free country.”

“That’s not what you were saying downstairs.”

“I have been in my room all day,” Castiel lied to her face as if it was nothing. “So I’m not entirely sure…”

“Cut the crap,” Meg snapped. “You were downstairs right now, being a creep and telling me how I need to leave, and I’m here to tell you I have no intentions to do that…”

“Meg.” Sam grabbed her by the shoulder, but he immediately let go when Meg shot him a furious look. “Listen, I came downstairs when Amelia told me what happened to you. I passed in front of Castiel’s door. If he had been downstairs, I would have seen him coming up again, but I didn’t. He’s telling the truth.”

Meg opened her mouth to reply that she had seen him, that she wasn’t crazy or dreaming or hallucinating, but even before she could get a word out, she knew there was no point. Sam wasn’t going to believe her, and Castiel wasn’t going to tell the truth. It was simple as that.

Amelia appeared behind Sam before Meg could go off at either of them.

“Oh, you’re up here,” she said, relieved. She was carrying a steaming mug that she had obviously intended on giving her, but she had completely forgotten upon finding the room empty. “I thought… well, how are you feeling?”

Meg was going to say she was furious and pretty certain she was being relentlessly gaslighted, but the truth of the matter was that a different feeling invaded her almost immediately.

“Tired,” she said, shaking her head. “I just… I need to get some sleep.”

“Yes, of course, you would need that,” Amelia agreed, and only after saying that she realized what random assort of people they formed atop of the stairs. “Uhm…”

“If that was all, I’ll go back to my work now,” Castiel said.

He attempted to close the door, but with a surge of energy that completely contradicted her claim, Meg stepped in and put her foot on the doorway to stop him.

“I don’t know what’s with you,” she told him, trying to pierce him with her stare the same way he did to her. "I don't know what your issue is, and frankly, I don't care to know. But I am not in the habit of backing down."

It brought her immense satisfaction to see a trace of emotion (was it surprise? Fear? Respect? Who cared?) flashed in his eyes for a second, before he once again fixed his cold, dead stare on her.

"You're the one disregarding your own safety, then," he concluded.

This time he closed the door before she could reply. Meg was left with the bitter taste of the answer she wanted to spit at him. Amelia and Sam only stared like there was something wrong with her.

To be honest, they might not have been completely mistaken. What was with her? Had she really just almost jumped at a guy's throat because of a hypothermia-induced dream?

"Meg?" Sam called her softly, as if he thought she was going to go off at him too. "Do you...? Are you okay?"

God, she really wished people stopped asking that. Especially people who took Castiel's side. She didn't know what side that was, exactly, but she knew no one was on hers.

"I'm going to take a shower and a nap," she announced, turning her back on him. "Don't bother waking me up for dinner."

Sam did the sensible thing and didn't follow her into the room.

Meg lost count of the minutes she spent underneath the stream of water, but she hoped it was enough to use up all the hot water in the hotel so Castiel would have to take his shower icy cold.

Though, for some reason, she didn't think he would mind that. Not only in an ironic 'his heart is frozen and dead already, so he won't even feel it'. But there was something odd with that man besides the cryptic warnings and the immediate animosity and Meg couldn't quite put her finger on it. It was like nothing ever touched him, nothing had touched him in years, like he was so far up above from everybody else (or his head was so far up into his own ass) that he couldn't bring himself down to understand why people didn't like to be kicked out of the hotel they'd just arrived at.

Claire had said he didn't have friends.

_He must be very lonely._

Meg turned the water off and rubbed her body with the towel furiously, as if to scrub away any trace of that thought. No, the guy was an asshole and she wouldn't wish his friendship on her worst enemy. End of the discussion.

She stepped out of the shower and ran her hand across the foggy mirror. The bathroom was so full of vapor she felt a little dizzy, or perhaps she was getting sick after all. It was the natural thing after being submerged in ice cold water.

She blinked and realized she had been staring at her reflection for several seconds without noticing what she was seeing. On the wet locks falling over her shoulders, a single silvery hair shone underneath the white lights.

Wonderful. How was that even possible? She was twenty-five, for crying out loud!

Cursing under her breath, she took the hair between two fingers and pulled, wincing as she plucked it off from her scalp. She let it fall on the sink, where it stayed almost undistinguishable against the white bottom.

What was the myth? Pluck a grey hair out and seven more grew? Where had she heard that? How come she couldn't remember? What did it matter? It was done.

She opened the water tap and let it wash the hair away.

There, out of sight, out of mind.

She almost laugh at the look of skepticism in her reflection as she turned on the hair dryer.

_If only._

 

* * *

 

She woke up with the uncomfortable sensation of having something on the tip of her tongue. She didn't know what it was, she couldn't remember what she had been dreaming about. She had the strange idea that she had been about to call out for someone, but now she'd forgotten who or for what reason.

Sam was sitting on the other edge of the bed with a hand on her shoulder. He hadn't even shaken her awake, she would have felt it.

"Were you having a nightmare?" he asked.

"No," Meg said, even though she had no way of knowing if that was true or not. She rubbed her eyes and sat up.

"You were mumbling," Sam insisted. "That never happens."

"I don't know," Meg said, now slightly annoyed at his insistence on the topic. "Did you just wake me to talk about dreams?"

Sam understood it was best not to poke her.

"Amelia says dinner is ready. I know you told me not to call you, but you haven't had anything since that breakfast at the bus stop, so I figured..."

Meg's stomach rumbled at the mention of food. So as much as she wanted to stay grumpy and alone, she needed to tend to her needs.

"I'll be right there. Just give me a sec."

She meant for Sam to wait for her while she went to the bathroom and combed her hair, but when she came back out, he was already gone. She couldn't be mad at him for it, though. Lately it was like the two spoke different languages the other thought they understood, but they couldn't quite get the exact meaning.

And that saddened her, because she and Sam had been friends for a long time while he was dating Jess and Meg was basically married to her career. It wasn't until both of those things had virtually ended at the same time (less than six months ago, now that she thought about it) that they had got together to have some beers, discuss how miserable they felt... and that had been when they'd got sort of, almost, kind of together, but not really.

The might have been a bit too drunk to define it.

"And she just... walked out on me," Sam had slurred, looking at the line of empty bottles over Meg's coffee table. "You know, she said... she said I wasn't giving her the attention she deserved and just..."

Sam was a sad drunk, and Meg had suddenly remembered why she didn't like sharing beers with him.

"Hey, screw her," she'd said, because she felt they had spent enough time on Sam's misery already and they needed to talk a bit about hers. "At least she didn't took all your stuff and your money with her. You still have your job. I'm fucked."

"No, don't say that." Sam had leaned over on the couch and placed a hand over hers. "Don't... you're gonna be fine. You're always fine."

Meg had meant to ask him how he could be sure about that, but when she'd turned her face to look at him, she realized their noses were practically touching each other. Sam had inched so close to her on the couch that she could feel the heat radiating from his body.

"What are you doing?" she'd asked.

Sam had startled and backed down a little bit.

"Sorry," he'd muttered. "Sorry, I didn't mean to... I just... I wasn't thinking."

And Meg had decided not thinking was exactly what she needed right then and there.

"Uh... Meg?" Sam had asked while Meg passed a leg over his knees to sit on his lap.

Whatever he'd been about to say, she didn't let him go on with it: she'd crashed her mouth against his. She didn't know what she'd expected to come out of it. Maybe a little consolation for the two of them, maybe a little bit of pleasure.

Or maybe she'd just been drunk and acted on pure impulse.

Sam hadn't reacted for a breath or two, but then he'd put his hands on her back and pressed her tightly against his chest. Meg's tongue had found its way into his mouth and she'd tasted the alcohol and the despair on the way he'd clang on to her.

"What are we doing?" he'd asked a little later, when they were already on her bed and halfway into undressing. Meg hoped he hadn't sobered up all of the sudden.

"I don't know," she'd said, sincerely. "We'll figure it out in the morning."

She should have known Sam was too much of a gentleman to just leave it as a drunken mistake and forget about it. So in the morning, he'd brought her water and an aspirin and taken her out for breakfast to a coffee shop he knew.

"Maybe we should give this a chance," he'd said, looking down at his coffee. “Maybe we can… try to make it work, you know? We’ve always got along and… well, I’m just putting it out there.”

It was like he was offering more out of some weird sense of duty than because he really wanted to be with Meg. And Meg had accepted because… well, she’d never really stop to think too much about it. Maybe because she didn’t want to be alone.

But in any case, she had known from the beginning Sam and her had an expiration date. And now it was simply drawing closer. Perhaps they could still finish that vacation together, but she had some serious doubts about that.

And what would she do afterwards?

She stopped with a hand on the doorknob, not knowing whether to cry or laugh at her options. She’d had to go back to the real world, to the apartment that she didn’t know if she could keep affording for much longer, without a job, without a boyfriend, without a prospect of what she could do with her life… the thought was simply depressing.

For now, her stomach was rumbling loudly. And that, at least, had an easy solution.

She walked past Castiel’s room again and stopped for two seconds to look at his closed door. There was no point in knocking and picking another fight with him, she knew that. But something about him – maybe his cold blue eyes, maybe the memories that he brought up in her, maybe the fact she knew in her heart something was wrong with that guy – just… got under her skin.

No, she decided as she turned her back on his door and started climbing down the stairs. That was probably just what he wanted. Probably what he’d wanted from the very beginning for some reason she couldn’t quite comprehend. And she didn’t care to, either. Out of sight, out of mind.

The hostel’s dining room could hardly even be called that. It was just a wide room right next to the lobby with two tables big enough for at least ten persons each. Sam was sitting as close to the corner as he could, tapping madly into his tablet. He didn’t even look up when Meg dragged a chair across from him.

If Amelia thought anything about how far away from each they were sitting, she hid the same way she’d hidden what she thought about Meg after her display with Castiel earlier: by smiling and being incredibly pleasant.

“Hello,” she said, as she settled the glasses and the cutlery in front of them. “We’re having chicken and salad for tonight’s dinner.”

“That sounds fine. Actually, do you have a little stronger?” Meg asked, before Amelia could grab the jar of water from the tray she was dragging with her. “Like, beer, perhaps?”

“Yes, of course. I’ll bring it right away.”

A song Meg sworn she had been hearing nonstop for the past year came floating out of the kitchen when Amelia opened the door to the kitchen:

_… a kingdom of isolation_

_And it looks like, I’m the queen…_

“Claire, turn the volume down,” Amelia huffed before the door closed at her back.

Only then Meg realized that Sam had decided to pay attention to her.

“What?” she asked, like she didn’t know exactly the reason he was staring at her. “Oh, come on, one beer is not going to kill me.”

“Meg,” he sighed, putting the tablet down. “We need to talk. I’m… I’m worried about you. I know you were having a hard time and that’s why you wanted to come here, but…”

“Stop.” Meg winced. She hated all those touchy-feely conversations, and maybe that was just another reason she would inevitably lose Sam. “I’ve had a real hard day…”

“I know, but…”

“Can’t you at least wait until after dinner?” Meg begged.

Luckily for her, she didn’t have to insist too much on it: Amelia came back out pushing the now seemingly over flowed tray. She parked it next to their table, placed Meg’s beer in front of her and opened it, then moved the platter to the middle of the table, all the time humming the tune of that freaking movie to herself and pointedly ignoring the heavy silence between the two of them.

“There we go,” she said, as she plced the salad dressings for them to choose. “Is there anything else you need?”

“We’re fine, thanks,” Sam said hurriedly. Meg knew he wanted to go back to the conversation they were having, but she had no interest in it, so she came up with the first excuse her brain could think of to retain Amelia:

“What about Castiel?” she asked, and despite wanting to kick herself mentally for it, at least she startled Amelia a bit. “Well, I mean, isn’t he coming down for dinner? I was kind of rude to him earlier and I was hoping…” Meg asked, completely aware she was digging her own grave in the clumsiest manner.

“Castiel eats in his room,” Amelia said, blinking at Meg like she couldn’t figure out why the sudden change. Meg couldn’t say she blamed her. “He… he prefers to be alone.”

“Why?”

“He’s like Elsa,” a little voice intervened. Claire was standing in the kitchen’s doorway, looking at them with her big blue eyes. She smiled when they all turned to pay attention to her. “That’s why it’s always so cold around him.”

_Let it go, let it go_

_I’m one with the wind and sky_

_Let it go, let it go_

_You’ll never see me cry…_

Meg’s jaw fell open in surprise. So she hadn’t imagine that. There really was something off with that guy, and the fact Claire commented on it so candidly…

“Yes, of course,” Amelia said, rolling her eyes like she had heard that argument far too many times. “He’s just like a Disney princess. He just goes around twirling in dresses and singing all the time.”

“Elsa is a queen,” Claire corrected her.

Amelia patted her in the shoulder.

“Call me if you need anything,” she told Sam and Meg. “We’ll be right over here. Watching _Frozen_. Again,” she added, with the face of a haunted woman. She gently pulled her daughter to get her to come inside with her, but Claire lingered at the door a little longer. Her eyes were piercing into Meg.

And Meg had the impulse to get up, grab the girl by the shoulders and ask her what she meant exactly, how was Castiel different, what had she seen to make her said that.

“Go with your mom,” she said instead, because she had let her gut guide her into doing enough nonsense for a day.

Claire blinked and pouted her mouth. She turned around so fast her straight blonde hair formed a halo around her head before she disappeared into the kitchen.

“Smart kid, huh?” Meg commented.

Sam sighed and then looked down at his tablet again.


	4. Chapter 4

Two hours into staring at Sam’s back, Meg realized there was no way she would be sleeping that night. She didn’t know why, since it had been a tiresome day filled with strong emotions and she should be exhausted. She was exhausted. But she simply couldn’t fall asleep.

The dinner had been awful. Not Amelia’s food; that had been delicious, but the flavor had been somehow ruined for Meg due to how tense things had got after she’d left them alone. Sam had spent dinner working and answering with monosyllables to any of Meg’s comment or questions, to the point she was sure she could confess she was planning to having sex with the entire town and he would have answered with a non-compromising “Mmhhh…”

That wasn’t like him. He never gave up so easily after she dismissed his concerns about her well-being. He knew her well enough to know that was what she did: she stalled and refused to talk about things that maybe, just maybe, she should be addressing. She was so used to put her walls up and wait for Sam to try to climb them that the fact he didn’t even attempt it this time baffled her.

It wasn’t just Sam’s silence that kept her up, though. It was also the look in Claire’s eyes as she walked into the kitchen with her mom. It was like she had tried to transmit something to Meg, something of vital importance and Meg had just… flat out ignored the message. She had let the girl down somehow and it bothered her that she couldn’t know how or why.

Meg shifted on the bed so she was looking at the white ceiling above her head now. It was so silent there. Except for Sam’s deep breathing and the ticking of the clock, there wasn’t a single sound coming out from the outside. It was like the Moonlit Heights and the quirky little town at their feet went to sleep the moment the light of day went away.

And she didn’t know why it annoyed her so much. She had come there looking for peace and tranquility. So why she felt so uneasy when that was exactly what she was getting? Why that silence unnerved her so much? Why couldn’t she sleep and think about all the things that haunted her in the morning, when everything was clearer and easier?

She turned around to look at the wall, and she realized she must have been sleeping already.

How else could she explain the fact Castiel was in the bed, lying right in front of her with his blue eyes open wide and boring into her? The bed wasn’t big enough for three people. And the fact she thought that and not the more logical “How did this guy get in my room and why is he lying here like a creep? I should wake Sam up” was a true testament that her conscious mind wasn’t in charge anymore.

“Please don’t wake Sam up,” he begged her in a whisper. How did he know that was what she had been thinking about? Because dream logic, of course. “I promise, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You failed,” Meg said, in the same tone. “You’re pretty damn disturbing.”

She should be disturbed, in fact. Not only had the bed got bigger, but the room was different. The temperature had dropped a couple of degrees and Meg found herself hogging the sheets and the covers to keep her warmth.

And that wasn’t the only thing that had changed. Castiel himself looked like someone – something – completely different. His hair was almost completely white and it seemed more abundant and messier than before, as if someone had ran their fingers through it or as if he’d just got up after an agitated night. Meg could see he wasn’t wearing anything, but that didn’t bother her as much as the fact he was _glowing_. A silvery, soft light radiated from his body and invaded the room around him, scattering the darkness away and making Meg’s eyes itch if she stared at him for too long. But she still tried to hold his gaze. It was a matter of pride.

His lips twitched, almost as if he wanted to smile but couldn’t bring himself to.

“You don’t look particularly disturbed.”

Meg realized that in here, the truth couldn’t hurt her. The truth wouldn’t make people think she was insane. Castiel wouldn’t deny what they both knew, because in here, it didn’t matter. They were alone there, wherever “there” was (Her dreamland? Her subconscious mind?) They were allowed to be sincere with each other in that place that was a hairbreadth away from being completely unreal. Because it was their hostel’s room and bed, but it wasn’t, the same way Castiel was and wasn’t at the same time.

She was sure it wouldn’t made sense in the morning, but right there, it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Because I know you,” she explained. “You saved me all those years ago. You were kind to me. You would never hurt me.”

Castiel sighed deeply, and suddenly, his face was one of infinite sadness.

“I would never voluntarily hurt you, no,” he agreed. “But there are powers that are beyond my will, that bind me into doing things I don’t want to.”

“What powers?”

He avoided her question. Of course he did. His hand was lying next to his face on the pillow and he moved it slowly towards Meg.

“You’ve grown so strong,” he commented. “I could hear your heart beating that night, through the storm. I could hear it from miles away. It was as if it was screaming to anyone who would listen that it just wouldn’t give up.”

“Yeah?” Meg tried to scoff, but apparently she wasn’t allowed to do that there. “And is it screaming now?”

Castiel’s fingers came to rest on her cheek. Meg felt an electric zap go through her body, travelling fast between his fingers and downwards over her skin, like a gentle tingle. It wasn’t unpleasant; on the contrary, it felt like every nerve on her body was suddenly awake and hypersensitive. She could feel her own lungs expanding and contracting, her blood rushing through her veins, her heart pounding against her ribcage…

“It screams you’re scared,” Castiel said, hi gruff voice dropping to an even rougher whisper. “It screams you’re furious. But it still won’t give up, it still has a fight to win.”

“Castiel,” she muttered with urgency, because the electricity running through her body was increasing in intensity, and now she could feel it like a bite on her lips, like a kiss on the crook of her neck. She didn’t have to look to know her nipples were standing erect, and she had to squeeze her legs shut to relief some of the burning pressure building up there.

“I’m sorry.”

Castiel’s hand move away, but she could still feel the ghost of his touch on her skin. It irritated her to no end.

“No one likes a tease, you know?” Meg said, snuggling further into the covers as if that could help. As if those feeble pieces of fabric would keep her protected from that strange being that walked in her dreams and woke her senses with such ease.

He looked sad again, a sadness so boundless and vertiginous Meg recoiled in its face.

“I…” she started, but she didn’t know what she could tell him. That she was sorry? That she didn’t mean to upset him? That she just didn’t understand what he was, how he did what he did and she had a million questions still…?

“Sleep, Meg,” he said. He sounded so solemn, like he was offering a solution to all her problems. “Rest. Find the peace you need, and then leave to never come back. I will use all of my will to stay away from you.”

Meg meant to ask him what he meant, why he always had to speak in riddles. But before the words could reach her mouth, he touched her again, this time placing two fingers on her eyelids. And suddenly all her limbs felt heavy as lead. The mattress sank beneath her, it gave out the same way the ice had given out under her feet that morning. And darkness was dragging her down again, but this time, she didn’t fight against, she didn’t resist. She let it wash over her and lull her into a dreamless sleep.

 

* * *

 

Amazingly, she didn’t feel tired when she woke up. She was trembling again, because it was the break of dawn and her personal body heater was still sleeping with his back turned to her at a distance that was as small as a few inches and as abysmal as all the things unsaid between them. But despite the bleak thoughts plaguing her, she felt invigorated, as if the electric current was still running through her every cell, pumping her full of exhilaration.

She sat on the bed and kicked the sheets. Sam moved and muttered something but didn’t wake up when he felt the weight shift besides him. Meg grabbed a hoodie on her way to the bathroom and walked around for several minutes, trying to get her heart to slow down for a moment. Everything around her seemed so… real, so hyper-real. The drawings on the wallpaper had a new clarity to them, as if their angles had become sharper and their colors brighter. Meg pressed her open palm against them and was disappointed to find they were just as flat as the previous day. She was so certain those birds were alive she stared at them to see if they flew off for what felt like seconds, but was actually a quarter of an hour if the clock on the wall was to be believed.

The patterns in the carpet and the covers had changed as well. They were rounder, more complicated, and it occurred to her that there was an occult meaning to them, something she could decipher if she put her mind to it. Or maybe there wasn’t, and maybe it was just that they were so beautiful and elaborated that she could rub them against her skin and keep them there forever. The wool felt rough against her cheek, and maybe it was weird that she was lying on the floor like that, trying to find a meaning in something that clearly didn’t exist. It was like she was drunk without a single drop of alcohol in her system.

The idea made her giggle, and the giggles were like a tickle on her sides, so she hugged them and started laughing, laughing, laughing unstoppably. Her ribs ached and she was gasping for air, but the cackles kept coming up at her throat and leaving her mouth and she couldn’t do anything about it. She didn’t want to do anything about it, because her head was light like it hadn’t been in months and the laughter shaking her body was just so marvelously cheering…

“Meg?”

Sam had finally woken up. He was looking around in confusion, and Meg laughed at him for not noticing she was on the floor.

“What…? Where…?”

Sam sat up, rubbing his eyes. His long hair looked like a nest of birds and Mg laughed again, even louder this time, because his hair always looked that messy, but he never seemed to realize it. Finally, after more eye rubbing and yawning and laughing from Meg’s end, Sam got up from the bed and stood towering over her.

“Hey,” Meg greeted him from the spot on the carpet. “How’s the weather up there?”

She laughed at her own joke, because it was hilarious even if Sam wouldn’t recognize it.

“What’s going on with you?” he asked, frowning. “Are you high?”

“Just high on life,” Meg replied.

Sam leaned over and grabbed her arm. Like the killjoy he was.

“Get up, come on. Meg, please get up.”

“Okay, okay, Mr. Grumpy.” Meg rolled her eyes at him but agreed to sit on the bed again so they could talk. “Hello,” she smiled at him.

“What happened to your hair?” he asked, frowning.

“What happened to my hair?” Meg repeated back at him, and when Sam huffed, she came to the conclusion that whatever it was the reason she had woken up in such a good mood hadn’t reached Sam. “No, really. What happened? What do you mean?”

Sam took a single lock of it and waved it in front of Meg’s face. She would have sworn that yesterday her hair was completely dark brown, but the hair that Sam was holding was only partially that color. The other part was silvery grey.

“No way,” Meg muttered, dashing past Sam and into the bathroom. Her reflection confirmed what she already suspected: her hair was still mostly dark, but there were enough grey hairs to make it look… make it look like it had snowed on top of her. The thought made her smile. She turned to confront Sam’s confused face with all the elated energy still rushing through her. “Well, apparently it’s true that you grow more if you pluck one.”

Sam didn’t laugh along with her.

 

* * *

 

It was… an interesting morning. Meg didn’t appreciate Sam insinuating she had taken something or done something to wake up in such an elated state, but then again, what could she tell him? “Actually the weird guy that’s staying two doors from here came to me in dreams and caused all this, and I don’t know how but it’s all related to him.” Even in her giddiness she was aware how that sounded and that Sam might try to take her back to civilization if she started speaking that sort of nonsense.

So all she could do was sit on the bed and insist she hadn’t smoked or taken anything and that she hadn’t done anything weird to her hair, it had just turned like that overnight because… well, because, Sam. Sometimes things happened and there was no explanation to them. Why couldn’t he just accept that?

Sam kept looking at her with a mixture of irritation and disappointment that made him crunched up his nose in a funny way, and it was really, really hard not to laugh at it.

“I can’t even talk to you right now!”

“Well, maybe don’t talk to me, then,” Meg replied, shrugging.

Sam did exactly that. He picked up his laptop and his tablet and he left, perhaps to find some place with Wi-Fi because he was a workaholic like that. Meg stayed in her room for another hour, looking at the small cracks in the white ceiling until the sensation of walking over clouds receded. By then she was starving and starting to feel like it wasn’t a good idea to stay in the town for so long after all.

But before she could locate Sam and tell him that maybe – _maybe_ – he was right and none of this was natural and she was starting to get slightly freaked out, she needed to eat.

On the way downstairs, she stopped for a second in front of Castiel’s door, wondering if it would be wise to knock. But she already knew what she would get if she did: more denial and attitude. And after the previous night and that morning, she wasn’t in the mood for it. She would ask him questions when she dreamed about him again.

She never stopped to question whether she actually would dream about him again. She simply assumed that would be the case for as long as she stayed near the Moonlit Heights.

Amelia was kind enough to point her on the direction to the Roadhouse. Not only that, she also made no mention of Meg’s hair, but she did comment on the fact that Sam had left without Meg earlier.

“You… don’t seem to be spending a lot of time together,” she commented. “Is everything okay? I-I don’t mean to be rude or…”

“It’s fine,” Meg replied curtly. “We’re fine. I just don’t think he’s enjoying it much here, you know? Nothing to do with the place. Sam is just a city bug.”

Amelia didn’t look convinced by that and Meg couldn’t blame her for it.

The Roadhouse was very busy when she entered. All the tourists from the town down the road seemed to be there, eating and drinking and disturbing the peace. Luckily for her, Meg found a quiet booth in the corner and waited for the three waitress moving around the tables to notice her.

It didn’t take long. Jo Harvelle seemed to have some sort of radar for detecting people she wanted to see.

“Oh, hey!” she greeted her as soon as she saw her. “You’re still here!”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Meg asked. That was a strange way to greet tourists.

Jo seemed a little embarrassed. “I just… you know… doesn’t matter. Love what you did to your hair. What can I get you?”

Meg ordered the double cheeseburger with a bottle of beer, because goddammit, she was so hungry she could eat an elephant. Her Olympic diet? Fuck that. She wasn’t participating in the Olympics for the future she could see, so since she was assassinating her career, she might as well get some sort of pleasure from it.

If Jo thought something of it, she didn’t show it; she just warned him that since they were a little flooded, it would take a while. Meg fished a newspaper from another table and entertained herself by finding out what was going on in the world outside the little hamlet. Not much, apparently, except that there was a snowstorm forecasted for that afternoon. That explained why Bobby Singer had chosen not to take the tourist up to the frozen lake: it would be a lot more complicated to bring them back down if he had to do it against the blizzard. A cautious man.

“There you go,” Jo said, placing the burger in front of her. “Enjoy!”

“Thanks. Wait, Jo,” she called her before the girl could move on. “Why were you surprised to see me?”

“Oh, I… I thought you had left,” she said, looking down at her shoes. “Castiel said you would.”

“Castiel?” Meg repeated, instead of saying what she was actually thinking, which was ‘ _Of cure he did_ ’.

“Yeah, when he was here to have breakfast,” Jo explained. “He comes every morning.”

“So you know him well?”

Jo fidgeted and looked around. It was obvious Meg was holding her from doing her job, but she found it hard to care. She wanted to know exactly what he had said about her.

“I wouldn’t say that, no,” Jo admitted in the end. “He just comes and has his coffee and doesn’t speak to people. He’s… reserved.”

Meg nodded and thanked her. She was starting to think there was no one in that town that could tell her much about Castiel, other than he was a weird and reclusive dude. That she could have find out for herself. What she wanted to know was how he did what he did, how he hadn’t aged a day in twenty years and why her mind constantly circled back to him, ignoring her relationship, her own instincts, her life outside of that place…

“You shouldn’t be asking so much questions, girl.”

The gruff voice startled her. Bobby Singer was sitting in a table to her side, and he had obviously heard her conversation with Jo.

“Why not?” Meg asked, raising her chin with defiance. “Is there a law that forbids it?”

“Not a written law, no,” Bobby said, cryptically.

Meg hesitated for a second. She had nothing to lose.

“Can I buy you a beer?”

“It’s my wife’s joint,” Bobby reminded her. “She made the burger you’re eating.”

Meg looked down at her half eaten lunch. Three minutes before, she was ready to gorge on it, but now that her attention was once again focused on the mystery around Castiel…

Bobby stood up to sit in front of her, with the face of a man who had done the same thing more times than he cared to count.

“What’s it to you, anyway?”

“Nothing,” Meg admitted with a shrug. “I’m just a curious person, that’s all.”

Bobby narrowed his eyes at her, like he thought Meg was pulling his leg. Meg stared right back at him. If he wasn’t going to tell her anything about Castiel, then she sure as hell wasn’t going to reveal why she was interested in him.

Finally, Bobby lost the stare contest, but he saved some face by taking a swig of his beer,

“Do you know how many accidental deaths do we have in these mountains every year?”

“How many?”

“None,” Bobby replied. “Avalanches fall, children get lost, skiers get hurt. But no one ever dies. Do you know how many deaths do other places like this have?”

Children could get lost. Meg suppressed a shudder and waited for Bobby to provide the answer.

“At least one or two, depending on how bad the winter is. It’s logical. There’s only so much the human body can take before it gives up. But not here, no. I have lived in this town for thirty years and I can’t tell you how many times we were sure we had lost someone to the mountains only to found them safe and sound, sometimes miles away from where they got lost. It’s almost miraculous, you know? Like someone is taking care of them.”

The man had hugged her against his chest. He had taken her near the rescuers, but he hadn’t shown himself to them.

“What’s all this to do with Castiel?” she asked, ignoring the growing pounding of her heart.

“Nothing at all,” Bobby said. “He’s just some guy who paints, comes here every winter and stays at Amelia’s place. He keeps to himself, doesn’t talk to a lot of people and come spring, he leaves until the following year. There’s nothing strange about that.”

He could have added a wink at the end of that statement, but he didn’t need to for Meg to catch his drift.

“You’re saying… he’s the thing taking care of the people who get lost in the mountains?” she asked.

She understood immediately why Bobby hadn’t just come up and confirmed that. It made perfect sense when unsaid, but when the words were pronounced out loud, it just sounded like mad talk.

“Of course not, that’s ridiculous,” the old man said, on cue. He took another swig of his beer, almost to punctuate it. “But I do know these mountains have something others don’t. The people who survive these incidents… they don’t talk about it afterwards. Most claim they don’t remember anything. Once they’re all better, they leave, and they never come back. That’s what I thought you were going to do after we fished you out from the lake.”

“I already came back,” Meg said, thoughtlessly.

Bobby’s eyes shot open. She noticed how his eyes stopped in her face, as if he was trying to remember her, and then moved up to her greying hair.

“Oh,” he muttered. “Well, I guess that explains it.”

“Explains what?”

Bobby didn’t answer. He looked away, and Meg followed his gaze to the window. The day was suddenly darker than it had been when she’d left the hostel. Dark clouds had begun accumulating in the horizon, behind the mountains, as if they were descending from there the top to swallow the town in their cold, dark interior.

“It’s going to be a couple of very cold days,” Bobby commented. “We best stay at the base.”

He finished his beer up in one gulp and stood up. Meg didn’t try to stop him when he strode away, even though now the questions searing in the back of her mind were picking at her even more insistently. She finished her burger, paid and left the restaurant. The snow had started falling hard when she stepped outside. She stopped to stare at the sky for a very long time. Then, she pulled the collar of her jacket up and slowly, she made her way down the now frosted street.


	5. Chapter 5

“I’m sorry, sweetie, it seems like we’re snowed in,” Amelia told Claire that afternoon. “We’ll go in the morning when it stops, okay?”

Claire didn’t seem satisfied at all with that explanation.

“But I want marshmallows with my chocolate!”

“I know you do,” Amelia said tiredly. Meg had the distinctive impression it wasn’t the first time they had this discussion. “But it’s snowing too hard, it’s too dark outside and we can’t go to the store.”

Claire crossed her little arms over her chest and huffed and puffed while her mother ignored her pointedly. Meg giggled behind one of the several second hand romantic novels she had bought at an absurdly low price before returning to the hostel. One of the good things about this being a small town with lots of tourist that came and go was that many of them left books behind when they went away, so according to Pamela Barnes, the owner, business was always good. She also spent a good thirty minutes interrogating Meg about the Olympics and Jo’s possibilities of entering. Meg had given her the number of some people and lower lever contests she could try first.

Despite her ominous chat with Bobby earlier, she actually felt good at that moment, with her feet up the coffee table and her ass planted on the armchair closest to the chimney. The book wasn’t particularly interesting (a garbage story about a girl kidnapped by a pirate ship and her very graphic sexual relationship with the ruggedly handsome captain), but that wasn’t really the point: the point was that she was finally cozied up and enjoying the calm she had come there to find.

It also didn’t hurt that Sam was stuck on the town down the road because of the storm. She had received a choppy call from him, his voice almost drowned out by the static, announcing all the roads were closed and that he wouldn’t make it back that night. She didn’t mind. After that morning’s fiasco, perhaps it was best if they spent some time apart. Perhaps she would suggest they spent even more time apart when they went back home. She felt no qualms about it and she didn’t want to make too much of it, especially not when the girl had just been tied to the post and…

“What are you reading?”

Meg startled and looked down. Claire’s blue eyes were stuck on her face, enormous and innocent.

“It’s… an adult’s book. You wouldn’t like it. It’s boring.”

“I’m already bored,” Claire protested. “Why don’t you make the snow stop, Castiel?”

She felt the cold breeze before she saw him. Castiel stopped by the door, one foot still in the air, his eyes down and his sketchbook hugged close to his body. He obviously had been trying to pass unnoticed, but he had just failed catastrophically at it. He straightened his shoulders and cleared his throat.

“I… I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “No one person can make it snow or stop at will.”

“You can,” Claire insisted with the stubbornness of a child who was completely certain of what they were saying.

“Claire, stop harassing Castiel,” Amelia said, walking on the room with a platter and four steaming mugs on them. Meg immediately moved her feet aside and pretended she wasn’t desecrating Amelia’s furniture at all. “And stop bothering Meg, too.”

“Oh, not at all.”

“She’s not bothering me…”

Meg and Castiel went quiet and awkwardly eyed each other. Claire moved her head to look at one another, and then a big, knowing beam extended through her face. Meg didn’t know what she was thinking or what she might have been about to say, but she was ever so glad that Amelia spoke first:

“Are you going back to your room? So soon?”

“I… yes, there are some… things I need to do.”

Whether he was an all-powerful snow spirit or a Disney princess or just some guy who happened to get caught in Meg’s overactive imagination, one thing was for sure: he was terrible at lying.

“Don’t hide away on my account,” she told him, leaning over to pick up one of the mugs. “I don’t care.”

Castiel clenched his jaw, but when he turned his eyes towards Meg, she could have sworn he was at the edge of tears.

“I rather not,” he said hurriedly. “Good night.”

And he squirreled away before anyone could insist on him staying.

Amelia looked slightly worried.

“He’s… well, I mean, he always keeps to himself, but he’s never been this rude before,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize for him. He’s a big boy. He does what he has to do.”

She took a sip of her chocolate. Claire was right, the absence of marshmallows really was a great loss.

“He acts like that because he likes Meg,” Claire chuckled. “And he’s too embarrassed to be around her.”

“Claire!”

Claire stood up and fled the common room with her mug, laughing out loud almost manically.

“Well,” Meg said to the flustered Amelia. “And I thought _I_ had been reading too much garbage novels.”

 

* * *

 

She’d fallen asleep with the book in her hand.

She remembered the letters dancing and blurring on the page as she struggled to decipher their meaning. She remembered feeling her eyelids heavy and her head falling back on the pillow, and at some point, she had stopped resisting and sleep had overcome her.

And she knew it happened because everything around her had the same silvery cold glow as last time, and when she tried to open the book again, some of the pages where blank while the others had the characters all scattered, without a single word making sense at all. She tossed the book aside and sat up on the bed, looking around.

Sure enough, he was standing by the window, pale and naked as last time, observing her with those blue eyes that looked like steel under that light.

“That’s creepy,” she told him, and he startled. “Watching a girl while she sleeps? Creepy as fuck.”

She thought he would go and she would wake up, but instead, his lips curved up in a smile.

“Well, then you’ll be relieved to know I am not actually here. This is merely a dream of yours.”

“Sure it is.” Meg rolled her eyes. “And now you’re going to break into a song about letting it go and make yourself a pretty blue dress out of ice.”

Castiel did neither of those things. He took a step towards the bed and hesitated at the edge.

“If you want me to leave, I’ll leave,” he promised. “You’re absolutely right, I should not have disturbed your sleep. I apologize.”

Meg stopped to wonder about that. She wasn’t sure what he was, but he was something, something that had the power to make it snow or stop at will, something that could walk into her dreams uninvited whenever he pleased. And yet, he was telling her she had the power to expel him from there if she wanted. She doubted her word had anything against whatever it was that he could do.

“Of course it has power over me,” Castiel insisted, and Meg should have definitely been more surprised that he could read her thoughts. “You can make me leave, Meg. You only have to wish it. In fact, it’s in your best interest that you do.”

Meg searched within herself… and decided she didn’t really want him to leave. She scooted over on the bed, leaving an entire side empty for him to come over.

Castiel seemed hesitant.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “I have told you this is not the best…”

“Yes, yes, mortal danger for me and all that,” Meg said, rolling her eye. “Are you coming or what?”

Castiel climbed on the bed very slowly, as if he was expecting Meg to change her mind at any second and giving her time to. Meg only observed him. His body was muscly, but not bulgy. He was built more like a regular runner or a swimmer instead of someone who put extra hours in the gym. His cheeks were covered in fuzz and he had delicate hands with long fingers, the hands of an artist or a sculptor. Everything about him was fascinating, if she was being honest, but she doubted anyone noticed because as usual, his eyes attracted all of the attention.

Well, not all of it.

Meg's eyes travelled downwards to address the elephant in the room. He wasn't as big as some of the guys she had been with, and to be honest, the thought alone of touching him sent shivers down her spine. If his cock was as cold as the rest of him or if it had the same property as his fingers, how would it feel like to...?

Castiel knelt on the bed, but halted all his movements at once.

"Meg... that is a dangerous train of thought you're following..."

"You have no one to blame but yourself," she replied, but she averted her eyes as if she was some sort of virginal maiden like in the garbage novels. "What do you expect me to think if you show up like that, huh?"

He looked uncomfortable all of the sudden, his shoulders slumped and his eyes lowered, as if he was a timid boy confronting his desires for the first time. Not at all like a powerful mysterious being made of snow and wind. Meg couldn't really say which one of the two she really preferred.

"I shouldn't be here."

"Then why are you?"

Castiel avoided her questions once more. He was particularly apt at that. He stretched his hand, and Meg closed her eyes, ready to feel his intense, electric touch again. Instead, he picked a grey lock of her hair between his fingers and analyzed it while crawling a little closer to her.

"You already started changing," he commented, sadly. "Why did you have to stay? Why couldn't you leave when I told you to?"

"Why are you still here?" she insisted. Because if she was doing something wrong for it, he wasn't giving her any reasons as to why it was wrong, and no reason at all to stop. "Why do you keep coming back if it's such a bad idea?"

Castiel grabbed her wrist and pulled her up without warning. Meg whimpered in surprise when the thin fabric of her nightgown came into contact with his marble skin, when his fingers sank in her hair and his mouth was hovering barely a few inches away from hers. Any other man, she could have felt the heat radiating from them, but Castiel was freezing. It should have been the opposite of erotic.

It wasn't. His iron grip around her wrist, the pure power emanating from his eyes, the edge of danger she could smell in the thin air around him... she shivered.

"I don't trust myself around you," he whispered with his gruff voice becoming even deeper. "Your heart keeps calling onto me, Meg, from the moment we lay eyes on each other. It keeps begging me to claim it."

"So we've gone from supernatural being to serial killer. You know exactly what to say to make a girl's nethers quiver."

Her joke fell flat. In part, because there was no joke funny enough to defuse the seriousness of the situation.

"It belongs to me," Castiel explained. "All of you, belongs to me. When you got lost in the mountains that night and I found you, you became mine. Everything that gets lost in the mountains is mine by right, but I let them go, I always let them go, and I let you go too. Why did you have to come back?"

Meg could have asked a number of questions in turn. She could have asked him just what the hell he was supposed to be, who exactly had given him the right to take everything in the mountains. She could have pointed out the growing hardness between them and made a joke about it. She could have said a lot of things that didn't matter and didn't make sense, but her mind was dizzy and her heart pounded so fast and hard she was almost certain it was about to jump out of her chest and right into Castiel's hands at any second.

"Maybe..." she said, through chattering teeth and gasping breaths. “Maybe I've known where I belong all along. Maybe it just brought me home to you."

She clashed her mouth against his before he could add another word. She wasn't ready for the eagerness which with he responded. His fingers sank in the back of her neck and pushed her closer to him, his breath sending waves of cold knives into her lungs. Meg moaned when the electricity started cursing through her skin, making all her hairs stand on end.

Castiel pushed her down onto the mattress, his hands locked with hers, straddling her and looking down at her with eyes that were more silver than blue, a deep glowing silver that Meg could fall into. She looked at him, trying to catch her breath and smirking, but he placed his index fingers over her lips.

"You have no idea the price you'll be paying," he said.

The weight of his body vanished.

Meg blinked and she wasn't surprised to see the sun had come up again.

This time, she was trembling from head to toe when she slowly planted her feet on the carpet, wrapping herself in the covers as she walked towards the window. It had stopped snowing. The world was covered in a pristine white mantle, and the sky shone bright blue again.

The door creaked open very slowly behind her and Meg turned around, Castiel's name on the tip of her tongue.

"Hey," Sam said. He looked tired, like he hadn't slept very well. His clothes were disheveled and wrinkled, like he had slept in them and his cheeks were covered in fuzz.

"Hey," Meg replied, pulling the covers closer to her a little more.

They stared at each other from both ends of the room awkwardly. She didn't know what else to say to him. If she had been her normal self, she would have made a snarky comment about his appearance, she would have poked fun at him for being so obsessed with his job that he had spent the night trapped in a storm searching for good wi-fi.

But while Sam sat on the bed and started taking off his shoes without saying a word, she couldn't do it. His shoulders were slumped and he looked almost sad, sad in a way she hadn't seen since he broke up with Jess.

"I didn't find a room anywhere," he said. "I had to sleep at the bus station."

"That's bad," Meg said, stupidly.

"Yeah, it was pretty cold, and I think I might have caught something," he replied.

It was almost like he was trying to explain to her why he didn't come closer and hug her and kiss her, like couples were supposed to do when they saw each other again. Except they weren't a couple. They were two very lonely persons that had hurdled against each other for heat and Meg didn't know how to address that.

"How was your night?" Sam asked, finally lifting his head to look at him. "You're still doing that to your hair?"

"I'm not doing anything to my hair."

But even before he pointed it out, even before she walked towards the bathroom and looked herself in the mirror, she already knew what she was going to see: the whiteness had expanded to the point it was now mostly white with some black strands in between.

Meg was very particular about her appearance, because it was one of the few things she had complete control over. She could control her body to a certain point, but there were always forces, like the inertia of the ice or the hunger in her stomach, that she couldn't bargain with. At some point in between medals, she had lost control of her career, and her relationship with Sam… well, she didn't think anybody could really control Sam. So everything she had left was her looks and she should be furious that whatever Castiel had done had prompted that change. Still, she was thankful. It was the only material proof she had that she wasn't imagining everything.

"Are you okay?" Sam asked.

Why did he have to be such a good person? If Meg had spent the night sleeping in a bench in some bus station and she was feeling sick afterwards, she would have buried herself in pillows and covers and ignored the world. Sam was trying to goad her to speak, and she really had no clue what to tell to him. _'Look, I might or might not be cheating on you with that weird guy staying down the hall, who might or might not be a supernatural creature of some kind that slips in my dreams when I'm sleeping. Also, I might or might not be losing my mind._ '

She came out of the bathroom and sat at the edge of the bed next to him, holding onto the covers tight.

"No," she said instead.

And suddenly, there was a lump in her throat and tears swelling up in her eyes. The other time, she had been exulting and hyper-energetic; this time, she felt like a ton of bricks had been dropped over her head and she couldn't shake the weight of her shoulders.

Sam inched closer to her but still didn't touch her.

"I know," he said. "I'm sorry, Meg. I... I really don't know how to help you."

"You don't have to help me, you idiot. That wasn't the point of all this," Meg groaned, but as soon as the words left her mouth, she realized she didn't know what the point of it all was. Forget about her troubles for a little while, perhaps? Try to figure out what was left for her to do? What for? How the hell was she supposed to do that?

After the committee had caught her skating partner Oskar taking every single diuretic known to mankind, including illegal ones like _fucking meth_ , she had been lucky they didn't strip her of all their medals and titles. She claimed ignorance and had to be submitted to a lot of humiliating tests to prove she hadn’t been doing the same thing. And after the fight Meg had with their trainer and manager, Rowena (she must have known about it, she must have been the one giving the drugs to Oskar, who else could it be?), it had been very clear there was no coming back from that one.

"It doesn’t matter if I passed, everybody is going to think I do it too!" she'd screamed. "Do you realize how damaging this is going to be?"

"Oh, please." Rowena had rolled her eyes and Meg had to wonder what it was that she could manage to make even that look elegant. "How many seasons do you think you have left? Face it, you're not so young, you're not so flexible anymore. Maybe this would be a good opportunity for you to start thinking about retirement, no?"

Meg had screamed a string of insults at her, none of which had fazed Rowena in the least, and then she had left her office slamming the door as hard as she could. She didn't admit until much later that she had been so furious because Rowena had a point. Figure skating wasn't a career many people followed past the age of twenty five, but Meg had thrown her entire life into it from the time she was twelve. And what exactly was she supposed to do now? What was she going to do with all those empty titles and medals?

She didn't know and she didn't want to think about it, so she had lost herself in bad TV shows, junk food and alcohol. And Sam. And none of it had given her an answer. Not because Sam didn't try, that was for sure.

"I do want to help you, Meg," he insisted. He stretched his hand, he hesitated, and finally, he let it rest in between the two of them, as if he didn't dare to close the gap between the two. "I know losing your career like that was a big deal for you, but you have to realize, it's not the end of the world..."

"It was the end of my world," Meg sighed. "Skating was the reason I got up in the morning after my dad died. What's left for me now, huh? Start over in another category? Teaching? Settling down with you in a white picket fence house with two kids and a dog?"

Sam closed his eyes and stayed silent for a long while. Meg already knew what he was going to say even before he started speaking:

"No, of course not. I know you don't want that. We're friends, Meg, and I care about you a lot, but..."

"But you don't love me," Meg completed it for him. "Because I'm not Jess."

There. The truth was out now, as clear and evident as the pristine snow. Sam scrunched up his face like Meg had punched him in the stomach, as if it wasn't evident, as if she wasn't supposed to see that she was the nail he was using to drive out the one before her. As if she wasn't doing the exact same thing.

They stayed quiet again, maybe because there wasn't anything left to say. Sam sniffed a couple of times, but Meg didn't know if it was because he had been reminded of his ex or if it was because of his cold. In the end, Meg unwrapped herself from the cover and handed it to Sam.

"Why don't you rest?" she suggested. "I'll go see if Amelia has some meds and... I don't know, maybe we can leave when you're feeling better."

"You really want to go?"

"Yeah," Meg lied. "Maybe coming back wasn't such a good idea after all."

"I'm sorry."

She didn't know why he was apologizing, and it didn't really matter. She got up to change and when she emerged for the bathroom, he was curled up in the bed, fast asleep. Honestly, it was for the best, Meg thought as she pulled another cover over him. The poor guy didn't deserve to be stuck with her issues when he already had so many of his own.


	6. Chapter 6

"Hello." Amelia greeted her with her usual smile when Meg went downstairs. "I saw Sam coming up earlier. So glad he could make it back. Are you having breakfast?"

"Well, I am, but..."

She explained about Sam’s ailments and Amelia immediately sprang to action: she took out a pad and a pen and started writing down everything they needed.

“We have a pharmacy down the street. We’re going to need some medicines and tissues… and I think I have a hot water bag somewhere…”

“There’s no need to make a lot of fuss over it,” Meg said. “When Sam’s sick, he doesn’t accept the help of people all too well.”

That was true. One time Sam had straight up groaned at her to leave him alone while in the middle of a hangover. And now, with all the fighting and awkwardness that had been happening between the two lately, she was more than certain he didn’t want anyone intruding into his misery.

“No problem,” Amelia said, raising her chin with pride. “I have a stubborn seven year old kid. I can deal with him.”

Meg was going to say that she doubted that very much, but then said seven year old kid bounced into the reception with a thick jacket, mittens that made her hands looked three times their size and her violet hat. Between that and the scarf she was wearing, her eyes and her nose were the only visible parts of her face. She had a pair of white skates around her neck, and she stared up at her mother with her enormous blue eyes filled with expectation.

“Oh, no, sweetheart, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Amelia said, frowning.

“But it snowed last night,” Claire pointed out. Her voice sounded muffled behind the scarf. “The ice in the lake is going to be thicker.”

“We don’t know the states of the road,” Amelia argued. “Bobby might not even be able to go up all the way there.”

“Well, I’ll go ask him,” the girl replied with a little shrug as if that was the only possible logical solution.

“Even if you do, honey, I don’t think I can take you there. I have so many things to do and Sam is sick…”

“I could take her.”

Meg didn’t realize the full implications of her words until after they had already abandoned her mouth. But as far as epiphanies went, she realized this one was a pretty clear one: she didn’t want to stay there after the heavy conversation she’d had with Sam and with the possibility of running into Castiel again. She needed to get out and clear her head and what better excuse to do it than to use it as an excuse to skate?

“There you go, Meg can take me,” Claire said, and she immediately lassoed her fingers with Meg’s. “You don’t have to worry about anything.”

She sounded like such a grown up saying it, it was almost comical. Amelia frowned, clearly unconvinced.

“Are you sure? Because maybe Meg would rather stay with Sam…”

“Actually, no. Like I said, he gets difficult when he’s sick,” Meg replied, trying to sound a lot lighter than she actually felt. “And besides, I just… I just need some time alone.”

Amelia blinked at her and understanding appeared in her face.

“Oh… oh, I see,” she muttered. It seemed like she wanted to ask further, to find out exactly about the nature of her problems with Sam, but at the same time, she realized it wasn’t a good idea to inquire something as personal as that. They were still strangers after all. “Well, if it isn’t a bother to you…”

“Not at all,” Meg insisted. “We’ll have a lot of fun, won’t we, Claire?”

“Yeah, mom.” Claire pulled the scarf down to smile at Amelia. “It’ll be awesome.”

And that settled it. As she walked down the street towards Bobby’s transportation holding hands with Claire, Meg felt the sting of two eyes in the back of her head. When she turned around, she saw no one on the street. A curtain moved up in the window of the hostel, as if someone had suddenly drew it close. She tried to pay no mind to it, but Claire realized what she was seeing.

“That was Cas’ room,” she said, confirming a suspicion that hadn’t even finished forming in Meg’s head. “We’ll see him up in the mountain.”

“Unless he runs past at the speed of light, I doubt that very much, kiddo,” Meg replied.

But she already knew that Claire was right.

 

* * *

 

They didn’t even need to go all the way up to the mountain to see Castiel. He was in the queue of people waiting for Bobby to finish looking into his van to make sure everything was right. He stuck out like a sore thumb, not only because his tanned short jacket and black turtle neck looked far too thin for the weather, but also because he was carrying a sketchbook and a pencil case close to his chest, like he had grabbed them absentmindedly and not even bothered to pick a bag where to put them. People glanced in his direction, but kept talking to each other like they knew it was better to simply not acknowledge the strange quiet man.

“Told you,” Claire commented.

Meg knew there was no point in asking how in the world would he have left his room and got there before they did. She decided it mattered very little, really, and she wasn’t going to let it bother her. What was more, she was going to straight do what everyone was doing and not even look at him.

She lasted around fifteen seconds before she moved her head ever so slightly, just enough so he would stop being in her blind spot. He was looking right back at her, his blue eyes piercing into her face and his full lips, the lips that had kissed her last night in her dreams, just barely parted. Like he was having a hard time breathing. Like Meg was the most beautiful thing he’d seen and he just couldn’t look away.

No one in her life had looked at her like that. The looks of admiration from the public when she was performing had come close, but this was more than that. This was that mixed with the eyes of a lustful lover, like he was barely containing himself from grabbing her and taking her right there on the snow in front of everybody. It sent shivers down Meg’s back and her knees were a little weak when she finally turned her head to pay attention to what Bobby was saying.

“… didn’t think you would back up so soon,” he said. “Is that Amelia’s kid?”

“Good morning, Mr. Singer,” Claire greeted him.

Bobby was obviously thinking this was a strange arrangement, but Jo jumped down the van’s ceiling (how did she keep climbing up there, Meg had no idea) and called him:

“We’re ready to go, dad.”

“Right.” Bobby scratched his beard and looked at the scarce handful of tourist that had gathered around. “Listen up, this day might seem like it was better than yesterday, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned is not to trust these mountains.” He made a pause and Meg had the impression he was looking at Castiel, but it was so quick that maybe she had imagined it. Or maybe it was because she was so acutely aware of his presence that she was sure everybody else must be as well. “So we’re going to be smart about this and keep an eye on the sky. If I say we move, we move, and I don’t want to hear anyone protesting about it. Are we clear?”

There was a murmur of agreement and Bobby climbed into the driver’s seat grumbling to himself. Meg was starting to think that was just a thing he did.

“Hello, Meg! Hi, Claire!” Jo greeted them happily as they offered her their wrists to tie the plastic band around them in exchange for the fifteen bucks. She was clearly going to comment something else when the air around them grew slightly colder and her expression turned into one of pure surprise. Meg didn’t have to turn around to know who was standing there. “Oh, hi… Castiel.”

“Hello,” he muttered awkwardly.

Meg concentrated on helping Claire up and squeezing by her side. Now that she thought about, she probably should have gone first instead of letting the girl sit by the window, but now it was too late. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as Castiel shuffled around with his belongings to extract the money from his pockets, as if he only now remembered he was supposed to use currency for this. It was almost adorable how uncomfortable he looked, and Meg turned her attention to Claire again just to avoid those kinds of thoughts.

“You okay there, kiddo?”

“I’m fine,” Claire said, tilting her head with curiosity. “Wonder why he comes here though, if he just can climb all the way up there.”

“No one can climb all the way up there,” Meg said, but she had no doubt in her mind Claire was right about this, just like she had been right about everything else.

Castiel clambered up on the van and awkwardly inched through the seat until he was right by Meg's side. His shoulder was grazing against hers and even through the clothes, Meg could feel the cold emanating from him.

"Good morning," he said, stiffly.

"Hi," Meg said curtly before turning her glance to the window once more. She was regretting not putting Claire in between the two but it was too late now.

"Hi, Castiel," Claire greeted him with far more enthusiasm and a smile that was missing another tooth. "Look: mom said the tooth fairy will come tonight again."

"That's great," Castiel replied. "Don't forget to leave a glass of milk and some cookies out for her."

"That's Santa, silly!"

"Is it? I always get them messed up."

Claire laughed at him and shook her head, with a condescending gesture that indicated the things Castiel didn't know could fill entire libraries. Meg did her best to bite back her smile.

The last tourist had finished climbing the van. Bobby reminded them if they didn't want to wear seatbelts it was at their own risk and started the engine. He sounded like a teacher chastising a very undisciplined group of school kids. Meg wished someone was there to share her amusement with, but the only other adult nearby was Castiel. She glanced at him, and he immediately moved his head to meet her eye.

"Yes," he said, smiling, as if Meg had expressed those thoughts out loud. "You're absolutely right. He is rather paternalizing."

"I didn't say anything," Meg replied, crooking an eyebrow.

"Sorry. My mistake."

He went back to looking ahead, but the grip of his hand on the sketchbook on his lap became tighter. Meg watched it out of the corner of her eye, and for reasons beyond her understanding, she placed her hand over her knee, near his.

No, they weren't beyond her understanding. She wanted him to touch her. She wanted to know if the electricity she felt in her dreams would be the same now that she was wide awake and willing.

But if Castiel noticed her wandering hand, he made no effort to reach for it or to start a conversation again. So Meg decided to ignore it and focused on the sights beyond the window. Strings of snow hanged from the tree branches, against a pale blue sky as they moved upwards and upwards. It looked quiet and peaceful and Meg wondered what it would be like to fall asleep on those mounts of snow that looked so soft and inviting.

"You would freeze," Castiel said, again responding to thoughts she hadn't expressed out loud, but at that point, she wasn't all that surprised by it.

"It's so pretty," Claire exclaimed with a dreamy expression.

"Thank you," Castiel replied, as if she had complimented one of his paintings.

"Did you do that?" Claire asked, pointing at the mountains' peaks.

"I helped shaping them," he replied with a shrug.

"And what about that? And that?" she kept asking, pointing at the trees, at the rocks, at the snow and the sky. Castiel gave her ridiculous answers, saying he hadn't made anything, but he had decided where they should be placed or what form they should have. Meg huffed. It was no wonder the girl knew he was some sort of strange, powerful being: he made absolutely no effort to hide it in front of her.

"No one would believe that," she said, interrupting as Castiel was talking about the highest peak and how he'd sculpted until it took the form that he wanted. "You know that, don't you? If the girl tells that to anyone, they're going to think she's insane."

Castiel shuffled in his seat, as if Meg's eyes had caught him unaware.

"Well, if nobody is going to believe her, I see no harm in it," he replied. "She'll forget eventually."

"Not all children forget," Meg said. And then she added, almost to herself: "I didn't."

He winced, and Meg was pleased to see at least she had made him a little uncomfortable. Claire seemed to perceive there was some tension going on, because she kept quiet for the rest of the trip.

They parked besides the lake and Bobby repeated his warning that they better moved if he told them to. There was a slow movement when Jo opened the door and started helping them out one by one. Castiel chose to jump down instead. Meg rolled her eyes and stretched her hand...

Cold fingers wrapped around it. The same electrical current ran through her nerves, making them stand on end. Her breath hitched in her throat as she turned to Castiel, paralyzed in her spot. He had the same look on his face, that look of fierce desire, of amazement, that made her want to shout at him or jump at his arms. Or both at the same time.

It lasted a second, maybe a fraction of a second. Not long enough for anyone to notice, anyway. Her feet were firm on the snow again a second later, but Castiel didn't let go of her until Claire pulled from her jacket.

"Meg, can we go skate now?" she asked, shyly, as if she knew she was interrupting something she didn't completely understand.

Meg shook her head and stepped away from Castiel.

"Sure, sweetie," she said, hoping against all hope that her voice didn't sound shaky. "Let's go."

She grabbed Claire with her other hand, foolishly wanting the sensation of Castiel's finger to linger on her skin for as long as it was possible.

"You going to give it another go, girl?" Jody asked her when she saw them putting on their blades near the lake. "You didn't have enough with freezing to death last time?"

"Freezing to death? I got a little chilly, at best," Meg said, rolling her eyes and the ranger laughed.

"Well, have at it," she said. "I'm going to stay right here and watch."

"I'm coming with you!" Jo said, running towards the bench, her skates bouncing up and down around her neck. "Wait for me."

"We'll wait for you down there."

"Yeah, Jo, hurry up," Claire said, sassily. "The ice will melt."

They all laughed again as Meg guided the girl to the frozen water.

"Okay, you know how to keep your balance?"

"Yep."

Claire demonstrated it by letting go off Meg's hand and leaning her body to gain velocity. Her technique was a bit clumsy, but then again, Meg was used to try and move as delicately as a swan, so everybody's technique was clumsy to her.

Jo skated to her and asked her to show her how to do a spin, so Meg started instructing her on how to do one.

"Keep your arms close to your body, like that. Now to gain velocity, you need to try to bend your knees like that..."

Jo managed to spins before she landed on the ice, lost her balance and fell down on her ass. Claire chuckled mockingly as she skated past them.

"I'll like to see you do better!" Jo shouted at her, frustrated.

"It takes practice," Meg said, gently helping Jo to her feet again.

"You make it look so easy!"

"It's because I have to, honey," Meg replied with a short laugh.

She felt the sting of a pair of eyes in the back of her neck. She didn't have to turn around to know exactly who it was. She breathed in deeply, bended her knees and skated away as fast as she could. When she had won enough, she jumped in the air, span three times and landed on her left foot, the blade hitting the ice so hard some shards flew at her feet. Meg extended her arms and bowed to her public. Jo and Claire applauded with enthusiasm, but it wasn't their reaction she was interested in.

Castiel was on the bench, the sketchbook open over his knees. He had the pencil against the page, but he wasn't moving it, preferring to stare at Meg instead. She gave him a smirk and did a couple more jumps and spins, just to show off. The girls cheered and clapped some more and then reminded her she was supposed to be teaching them some tricks.

"Sorry, sorry," Meg laughed, her face red from the effort.

When she looked over her shoulder, Castiel was gone, but his black sketchbook was abandoned on the bench.

In Meg's defense, she held her curiosity pretty good until Jo and Claire were exhausted and no longer paying attention to her lessons, until the grey clouds swallowed the sun and Bobby started screaming at them it was time to get down again. She patiently took off her skates and tied her boots with special care. The girls didn't even look at the sketchbook lying right by their side, but she supposed she shouldn't be surprised by that. She let them go a few steps ahead of her before grabbing it.

She didn't open it there, but she held it close to her chest, the textures underneath her fingertips as cold as Castiel's skin. He was standing by the van's door when she caught up with them.

"You forgot this," she told him, holding the sketchbook up so he could see it.

"No, I didn't," Castiel replied. Before Meg could protest, he held up another sketchbook, nearly identical to the one she had in her hands. "You must have it confused. Or it may even be yours."

With that, he turned around and climbed on the van, this time without helping her or anybody else. Meg let a couple who had cameras around their necks go ahead of her and Claire so this time, they had three people in between the two.

They didn't even glance at each other for the rest of the trip.

 

* * *

 

They had lunch at Ellen's restaurant with the rest of the group of tourist Bobby was meant to drive back to the other town before the storm hit. Claire devoured her burger like she hadn't eaten for days, and Meg kept looking around the restaurant, but it was clear Castiel had returned to the hostel. Or wherever it was that he went during those times.

"What's that?" Claire asked, pointing at the sketchbook with fingers stained with ketchup.

"I don't know," Meg said, passing her several napkins. "Why don't you open it and see?"

Claire cleaned her eager hands and did exactly that. Meg resisted the urge to look over her shoulder until the girl exclaimed:

"Woah! It's you!"

On the first page of the book, there was portrait of her, but she looked far more beautiful than she really was: Castiel (because no matter how much he denied it, it had obviously been him) had drawn her with her hair completely black again, falling around her face in long, formless curls. She had a smirk on her face, high cheek bones and a mischievous glimmer in her eye.

Claire passed the pages to find more charcoal sketches of her, her face looking in different angles, different kinds of smiles in her lips. Others were of the lake: the mountains skyline in the distance, the trees forming a frame around the water. Meg was flying over it with swan wings on her back and a white long dress with an elaborated corset and the skirt tangling around her legs.

A bridal dress.

"I told you he liked you," Claire muttered.

Meg slammed the sketchbook close.

"Well, that's just silly," she said. "If he liked me, he could just say so."

Claire took another bite of her burger and chewed it very slowly, as if she was lost in deep reflections.

"Maybe... he can't just come and say so," she commented. "Because of what he is, you see?"

"Finish your burger, kiddo," Meg said, taking out her cellphone just to have an excuse not to keep talking to her. "I'm sure your mom will want you home very soon."

The snow was falling heavily when they took to the street. By the time they arrived to the hostel’s gates, they were sinking up to their ankles in it and hugging their bodies to keep the warm against the freezing wind. Luckily, Amelia was waiting for them with a raging fire and hot cocoa.

“This time it has marshmallows,” she said, winking at her daughter.

Claire looked immensely pleased by it.

Sam was downstairs, wrapped up in several blankets and surrounded by a small mountain of used tissues. He was coughing into the half empty bowl of soup in front of him, but he still managed to smile at Meg when she showed up and dragged a chair to sit by his side.

“Hello,” he said, with a rough voice and a sniff.

“How are you doing?” Meg asked, as if his red nose and bloodshot eyes weren’t enough indication.

“I’m… holding on,” he said. “How was skating?”

“It was so much fun!” Claire exclaimed as if the question had been for her. “Meg did some really cool jumps and tried to teach Jo how to spin, but she couldn’t get it right until…”

“Claire, come help me with the kitchen.” Amelia didn’t wait for her daughter to obey: she grabbed her by the shoulder and gently coaxed her out of the room.

“Cute kid,” Sam chuckled.

“Yeah, she is,” Meg replied.

She continued sipping from her cocoa, waiting for him to say what was obviously running through his mind.

“I’ve asked Amelia to give me another room,” Sam confessed in the end. “You know, so you don’t have to… listen to me coughing all night.”

“That’s fine,” Meg said. She didn’t ask if it was because now that they couldn’t keep pretending they were in a relationship, he was a bit apprehensive to sleep by her side.

Sam shuffled in the couch and pulled the covers tighter around him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He didn’t have to clarify what he meant.

“You don’t have to be sorry about anything, Sam,” Meg replied. “I knew it wouldn’t last.”

“Then why did you…?”

“I was lonely.” She shrugged. “I was sad. I figured you were feeling exactly the same thing. I should have told you from the beginning it wasn’t going to be what you imagined it, but I guess it was easier to take advantage of your good nature.”

Sam tried to laugh, but it soon became a coughing fit. Meg waited for him to calm down while holding a box of tissues in front of him. Sam picked one and nosily blew his nose.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Definitely didn’t turn out how I was expecting. I still… think of Jess a lot. It was too soon.”

“Maybe you should call her when we come back,” Meg said. She still talked about coming back as if it was a possibility to her.

“Maybe,” Sam smiled. He stretched his hand towards her. “Can we still be friends, though?”

“You don’t even have to ask that,” Meg replied, grabbing his and giving it a squeeze.

She still felt slightly guilty doing it. Friends told each other the truth. And she was hiding everything that had happened to hr since they'd arrived.

The wind started blowing with such violence that the window’s pane shook and knocked against the glass. Sam startled a little as Amelia ran back into the room to check if all the windows were latched.

“It’s going to be a big one tonight,” she commented, turning to them with a frown. “Might even turn into a blizzard. It’s weird, though. We’re having too many storms for the season.”

“Damn global warming.” Meg shrugged, even though at least three people in that hostel knew that wasn’t the reason.

“I’m going to look for the candles and the flashlights,” Amelia decided. “The electricity could go out.”

She walked out again for her stash. Sam and Meg looked at each other, and for the first time in many days, they smiled.

“Guess there’s nothing left to but tuck in early.”

“Guess so,” Meg muttered, staring at the bottom of her now empty mug.

Castiel was standing atop of the stairs. His icy blues were fixed on her, as it was usual now. He nodded so slightly Meg wasn’t sure if she had imagined it. She had the impression he knew exactly what she had talked about with Sam.

Before she could climb a single step he disappeared into his room, as light as a breeze, but it didn’t matter. Meg went to bed and let the howling of the storm lull her to sleep.


	7. Chapter 7

He came for her that night, like she knew he would.

The mattress by her side sank with his weight and his arm passed possessively over her waist, pulling her closer to his naked chest.

“Castiel,” Meg muttered, turning around.

His face was so close to her she could count the different shades of blue in his eyes. He didn’t say anything for a heartbeat or two, limiting himself to brush Meg’s hair aside and throw his breath into her face.

“You’re making a mistake.”

“Haven’t we been over this?” Meg asked, snuggling closer to his neck and breathing the strange aroma of his body. He smelled like thin air and pines, like the clear mountain breeze. “I’m not leaving.”

“You don’t even know who I am. You don’t even know _what_ I am.”

Meg looked up at his worried face, at the small crinkles around his eyes, his mouth contorted in a disapproving gesture. She lifted her hand to touch his cheek. His skin was so soft and barely warm, like staying with her had heated it up somehow. He didn’t try to push her away or told her to stop, so she dragged her fingertips down his jawline, his chin, his neck, until she let if fall over his chest, pressing right where his heart should be. She heard it beat, strong and loud, and she could imagine the entire mountain, the entire town, pulsating in time with it.

“Show me then,” she said. “Show me exactly what you are and then let me decide.”

She was half certain he would refuse, that he would disappeared again and she would wake up in cold, empty sheets with her hair whiter than the previous day. But once again, he defied all her expectations: he grabbed her hand and gently guided her out of bed and towards the windows. He was naked once more, and his skin seemed to glow in the darkness as he opened the latch. The window’s panes blew aside, hitting the walls with violence. Meg shivered and narrowed her eyes at the freezing wind and snow that came in with it.

Castiel sat up on the window’s ledge with his back to mountains. He pulled her closer and Meg understood. Clumsily, she climbed onto the ledge, trying to ignore the void waiting for her underneath. It wouldn’t be a long fall, but she wasn’t exactly willing to risk it as she hanged onto Castiel’s neck with all her forces. He was marvelously firm, like a rock in the middle of an agitated ocean. She found her place in his lap and he pressed his lips against her temple.

“Am I still dreaming?” she asked.

“No. You’re awake. Are you scared?” he asked as he wrapped his arms around her.

“No. I’m never scared with you.”

“Good.”

He leaned backwards and gravity got a hold of them.

Despite her affirmation, Meg closed her eyes and screamed, sinking her nails on Castiel’s flesh while absolute panic rushed through her veins. She waited for the hard ground… and it never came.

Slowly, she opened her eyes. She was still clinging onto Castiel’s neck while he firmly held her by the waist. They weren’t falling, in fact they were sliding through the sky as easily as she slid on her blades. Shards of ice and small snowflakes got tangled in their hair and her nightgown flapped around her legs thanks to the wind. Meg breathed in a couple of times, trying to get her frantic heart to calm down, and looked up at Castiel. He remained perfectly calm, though she could have sworn there was a little mocking smirk in his lips. The snow swirled over his back with more instance, as if it was hitting against something, and maybe if she tilted her head in a certain angle, she could almost make out the silhouette of a pair of wings.

But that was the least interesting thing going on. There were soaring miles above the ground, crossing through the dark grey clouds and flying straight towards the mountain in front of them. Now that the initial panic had passed, Meg felt giddy and euphoric. She let out a chuckle and Castiel’s chest rumbled with laughter in response.

“Turn me around!” Meg demanded.

He let go of her for just a second, enough so that Meg would be as light as the snowflakes, and immediately held her again, this time with her back against his chest. Meg saw the outline of the town’s houses, so far way they looked like small toys, engulfed in a hurricane of whiteness. They left it behind in the blink of an eye, and the lake appeared underneath, dark and round like an eye staring up at them.

“This is so beautiful!” she exclaimed.

“Hang on,” Castiel whispered in her ear. “You’ve seen nothing yet.”

There was a flutter in the wind, and now they were aiming even higher, so high Meg started feeling a little lightheaded. They left behind the storm to where the sky was a calm black velvet. They were flying around the mountains white peaks, a mantle of snow that had gone untouched for years glimmering in the starlight. Meg would have said it wasn’t physically possible that they had moved that fast, but then again, with Castiel there was very little that was truly impossible. She took in the sights with childlike wonder, knowing full well she would never see something as majestic as this again.

“Are you alright?” Castiel asked.

“I’m more than alright!” she laughed, the same sensation of happiness that she’d had the first night he’d visited her returning.

“I’m glad,” Castiel said. She could almost sense the smile in his face. “We’re almost there.”

She hadn’t really considered he was taking her somewhere, but that now that he’d said it, she was aching to see it. They planed over the vast regions of rocks and snow, tossing and turning so many times Meg ended up dizzy. She had no idea in what direction they had flown anymore or how far away they were from the town, but she couldn’t have cared any less. She was with him. She wasn’t afraid.

Finally, a white structure near the peak of one of the mountains rose up to greet them. It was akin to a small castle, with towers and arches, but as they flew closer, Meg noticed two things: the windows and balconies were wide and welcoming, but there was no door anywhere. It could only be accessed by air. And the second thing she noticed was that it wasn’t actually white. It only looked like that because she could see the snow through it.

Castiel dropped suddenly and Meg’s stomach lurched, but a second later, they were gently landing in one of the balconies. Her heart was racing again and she had to lean against him until her knees stopped trembling. But when he touched her face and gently moved her face up, she was smiling once more.

“Well, you really do know how to woo a girl,” she commented.

Castiel had no reply as Meg staggered away from him and grabbed onto the nearest wall to confirm her suspicions.

“Ice,” she muttered, turning around to look at him with an amused smile. “It’s made of ice.”

She almost started laughing manically again, if it wasn’t because his hand came to rest on her back.

“Come in,” he said. “You said you want me to show you. And that’s what I brought you here for.”

He walked her through a wide arch into a room illuminated only by a slight silver glow. Meg was going to ask what she was supposed to be seeing, but as her eyes got used to the light, she discovered the room was crowded: there were tables and chairs with broken legs, shelves stuffed and surrounded by piles of books, paintings and tapestries abandoned against the wall, and thousands of other trinkets that no longer had any value, like an old disc phone, an oil lamp, several fans opened with their fabric torn and yellowing.

“Okay, so you’re a hoarder,” Meg said, making her way through Castiel’s little treasures. “I’ve had boyfriends with far worse bad habits.”

Castiel didn’t laugh at her joke. He merely followed her around as she moved around the room, discovering that the further she went, the older his relics became: soon she was surrounded by spearheads, old leather shoes and another shelf: this one, instead of books, contained thousands of small wooden figurines portraying birds, wolves or fish. Meg picked one up (a mountain lion) and ran her fingers through the carvings.

“They were a peaceful people,” Castiel said, startling her. “Their name roughly translates to the Mountain Dwellers. They went down to the valley during the spring to hunt and gather food and spent the winters near the lake. Eventually, they died down or joined other tribes, but while they lived near me, they always presented me with these so I would favor them and protect them from bad weather. And I did, within my possibilities.”

“So, you’re like, what? An ancient Native god? That’s what you’re trying to tell me?” Meg tried to make her tone sound light, but she failed miserably. She was only now starting to get that Castiel was something she could never quite comprehend.

“I am not a god,” he said. He seemed a little saddened. “But I am ancient.”

Meg placed the little figurine back with its sisters and turned to look at him.

“So _what_ are you?”

Castiel looked away briefly and took a deep breath, even though Meg was certain he didn’t need to breathe.

“In the beginning, He said: ‘Let there be light’. And we were in the light; we _were_ the light,” he told her. “We were made to love Him, to sing His praises and announce the world His will. We were His messengers and His warriors and for eons we remained by His side, witnessing His wonders and His miracles.”

“Angels,” Meg whispered. She had never been particularly religious, by the reverence in Castiel’s words was contagious. “You were angels.”

“That is one of the many names human gave us, yes,” he replied. “He created the Earth and the humans and sent us here to guard it. I was stationed on these mountains for so long I learned to admire them, to love them as part of my Father’s creation. In my arrogance, I even came to think of them as mine. I loved to fly high in the full moon nights and watch the silver light glimmer on the snow.”

“The Moonlit Heights,” Meg muttered.

Castiel cracked an amused smile. “The name remained through languages and generations of people. I don’t know why. One of my Father’s mysteries, I suppose.”

“Okay.” Meg rubbed her eyes, trying to wrap her head around everything Castiel was implying. Not only there was a God, there were also angels who walked the earth and guarded it. It was a lot to take in, but she breathed deeply and looked at him again. “And what happened?”

“Lucifer’s rebellion,” he said, his face somber,

“Oh, so he’s real too,” Meg said with a hysterical giggle. “Sorry. Go on, please.”

Castiel frowned at her, but kept on talking:

“Some of my brother’s took our Father’s side, some took Lucifer’s. But some of us… we were reluctant to fight. Like it’d happened to me, many of my brother’s had fallen in love with Earth: with its woods or jungles, with its deserts, with its shores and seas. We didn’t want the war to devastate the place we cared so much for. Our hesitance earned us a punishment once Lucifer was defeated. He was vanished to Hell… and we were forever tied to Earth.”

“What the…? Why?” Meg asked, frowning. “Just because you didn’t want to go to war?”

“In not doing as He had ordered us, we revealed that we loved Earth more than we loved Him,” Castiel explained. “We weren’t rebellious like Lucifer, but we were… deserters. Father explained it to us, He told us the Gates of Heaven would forever be closed for us. We could never go back home unless we repented and asked for His forgiveness. A few of my brothers did, but most of us loved Earth far too much. And so, we chose to stay,”

“Good,” Meg said. “That was an all-around dick move.”

“Please, don’t blaspheme like that, Meg,” he said, but she thought she saw the same smirk passing like a shadow through his face. “We accepted our punishment with resignation, but Father gave us one last mercy: we would stay in the places we loved the most, and we would have a limited power over them, since they were now our domains as much as they were our prisons.”

“Prisons?” Meg repeated. “You can’t leave?”

“I’ve tried. The further I go, the worse I feel and after a certain point, I begin to fade. In winter, I can go a little further. But yes, I am essentially confined to my Moonlit Heights.”

He gave a little shrug, as if he didn’t mind it too much. But that didn’t explain why he spent his time pretending to be human in the town at the feet of the mountain.

“It does get lonely sometimes,” he admitted. Meg had forgotten she didn’t always need to formulate her thoughts out loud for him to pick them up.

“So that’s why you take the people that get lost in here?” she asked, taking a step closer to him.

“I never take them, but they’re mine as everything here is mine,” he explained. “I’ve told you this”

“Yes, you did,” she replied, taking another step. She didn’t want to talk anymore, but Castiel didn’t reach out for her.

“You seemed awfully unconcerned for your personal integrity,” he said. The burrow between his eyebrows grew even deeper. “Don’t you want to know what would happen to you if I take you, if I claim you like you want me to?”

“Honestly, the way you put it, it just sounds like an awful lot of fun,” Meg shrugged. Castiel continued scowling at her, so she huffed. “Okay, fine. What would happen to me?”

“You’d die,” he state bluntly.

Meg blinked at him. “Well, for all the talk about it being dangerous and a bad decision and all that, you could have started there.”

“You’d die, but that wouldn’t be the end of it,” Castiel said, ignoring her quip. “Since you’d be tying your fate to me as I’ve tied mine to the mountains, you could never go to Heaven or to Hell. Your soul would remain here forever. You’d become like me: a ghost, a spirit of the mountain people would notice but not talk about too much, not acknowledge too much.”

Meg tasted those words in her mouth, thinking if it would be so terrible. If it would be all that different from where she was now.

“Meg, you can’t throw your life away just because right now you don’t know what to do with it,” he said, frustrated. "You're still so young. The world is so full of possibilities for you. Like all the others, you will find out this is not what you really want..."

"All the others?" Meg repeated. "Has there been others?"

Castiel grabbed her hand and gently guided her down a darkened hallway. Meg was barefoot, but she was surprised to discover the ice underneath her feet didn't make her feet hurt. Maybe it was because all the time he had passed with Castiel so far was making her immune to the cold.

"You're right," Castiel said, pulling her past yet another arch. "My presence does affect you in this way. Were you to stay longer, I'd reckon you would start dying very soon. It was at this point that all of them left."

Meg was going to ask again who he meant, but then the moon moved past the peak and a silver ray fell on the right angle over the transparent walls that the entire room was lit up. There dozens and dozens of canvasses placed against the walls, with as many faces looking at Meg from them. Men and women, some of them smiling, some frowning, of all ethnicities and ages, the details of their faces immortalized forever there by the immortal creature that had loved them. Here there was a Native girl, barely out of her teens, with flowers in her black hair that despite her youth still show a few silver strands. Over there, a man with grey hair and dark eyes in an overcoat grinning. A redheaded woman sticking her tongue out playfully, a black man with an intense smile, a woman with brown curls and aquamarine eyes... so many more Meg didn't even get to distinguish...

"I always let them go," Castiel repeated, in barely a whisper.

"You let them go," Meg repeated, only now understanding what he meant. How hard it must have been for Castiel not to have one moment of selfishness, not to hold even one of those persons against their will. He was so powerful and ancient she doubted they even would have had a fighting chance against him, and yet _he let them go_.

"I don't want them to stay because I force them to," he said. "I want them to stay because it's their choice, but I understand the price to pay for that is far too high. I never blame for them choosing otherwise and I won't be mad at you when..."

"Oh, shut up," Meg snapped at him, her voice broken.

Castiel opened his mouth to do the opposite of that, but Meg was done listening to him. She placed a hand behind his head and crashed her mouth against his. At first he was tense, but as the electric current started flowing between the two, he relaxed. Meg broke apart to take a breath (or perhaps, to not let her own tears choke her), but he didn't give her time. He wrapped his arms around her, engulfing her in his embrace, span around and pushed her against a wall. Meg didn't even have time to react before his mouth was on hers again, more insistent, more desperate this time. His teeth sank in her lower lip, biting and nibbling recklessly while his fingers tangled in her hair.

It was like being kissed by the wind, by a force so unstoppable and strong the only thing Meg could do was close her eyes and let it happen. Oh, God, she wanted it to happen so much, she wanted him, she needed him...

Castiel broke the kiss, leaving her panting and limp in his arms. His hair had turned white again, so he was once again her stranger in the storm. There was a fierce look in his eyes when he looked at her.

"You're wrong," he said. "I can be extremely selfish sometimes."

"Well, guess you're due," she commented, before pulling him down for another kiss.


	8. Chapter 8

Castiel might not have been a god, but he made love like one. He took her to bed (why he had a bed if he didn't sleep, Meg didn't know or care) and peeled away her nightgown like he was unravelling a secret, his fingers stopping to caress every inch of exposed skin before pulling it down another inch. Meg would have protested how slow he was moving if she hadn't been so busy drowning in his mouth and gasping for air every time he broke their kiss.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he tossed the piece of fabric aside and pushed Meg down on the soft feather mattress before covering with her body and shushing her moans with another kiss. He didn't feel cold against her skin anymore. His thumb circled her nipples with care and the minute he moved to kiss her neck, Meg let out a shout of pure frustration.

Castiel immediately halted everything he was doing and looked up at her.

"I'm sorry. Is what I'm doing not... correct?"

"Fuck, Cas, just..." Meg closed her eyes and breathed in deeply', trying to gather her thoughts at least long enough to sound coherent: "I... just... do you mind just fucking me please?"

If Castiel was surprised by her directness or her foul language, it was hard to tell.

"I just want to make this more enjoyable for you," he explained, sheepishly.

"I know," Meg said, placing a hand on his shoulder and pushing him away a little bit. "But you've had the goddamn foreplay going on for days now and it's torture. So just..."

Castiel understood what she wanted. Of course he did. He flipped them over so Meg was now on top. She thanked them with a sigh of relief as her hands wander down his chest, his stomach. He wasn't built like an Adonis with abs and muscles, but she still could feel the strength of his body in her hands. It was so strange that he was so solid, so corporeal, after he could walk so easily into his dreams, after telling her he was a being of light and time.

Meg wasn't complaining, of course. Her hand finally found his hard on. He arched his back up, her name escaping his mouth as Meg gently guided him inside of her. It was so easy how the fit into each other, like two pieced of a puzzle neither of them had the whole picture of. Well, maybe Castiel saw a little more than she did. It didn't really matter. As Meg started rocking against him, as his hands came to rest on her hips, accompanying every movement she made, his eyes fixed on her face with that reverent, lustful look...

... she was his. She belonged to him.

And no matter how much he tried to warn her against it, she liked being his. She liked how complete she felt.

Her movements became more erratic with every thrust, pleasure building up in her gut. Suddenly, Castiel sat up, sinking himself even further into her. Meg screamed as she grabbed onto his shoulders and he pulled her close, his mouth finding the crook between her neck and her shoulder. He muttered something in a language she didn't quite understand, but a part of her mind registered the meaning of the words anyway.

They talked about devotion. They talked about love.

Meg came while holding onto him like he was a piece of wood in the wreckage, her nails scratching his back. Her orgasm clouded her mind, so she didn't realize for several seconds what Castiel was doing: he kissed the tears rolling down her cheeks, he kissed her eyelids and the tip of her nose as he gently laid them both down on the bed. Meg closed her eyes, her chest heaving while the ripple of her pleasure weighed down on her limps. Castiel muttered another thing in her ear and kissed her one more time before pulling away.

She felt strangely empty without him. She wasn't usually one for clinging or cuddling after the deed was done, but she had the strange need to crawl closer to him. Castiel extended his arm so she could lie on it and gently brushed Meg's hair off her face. She smiled groggily at him and was about to make a joke about claiming and taking when she looked down.

"I... but you didn't come," she exclaimed.

Castiel's dick was flaccid and glistening obscenely with Meg's juices, but there was no trace of him on her. He tilted his head, confused, like he had no idea what she was talking about.

"You didn't come," Meg repeated, her cheeks burning for how fixed she was on that issue.

"I did," Castiel replied, passing an arm over her shoulder. "It was extremely pleasant, Meg. I... I've forgotten how much, in fact."

He chuckled and Meg felt even weirder, because she wasn't exactly fishing for compliments there.

"But you didn't..." she insisted. Goddammit, why was she so flustered? She was no blushing virgin for fuck's sake, she should be able to ask...

"Oh, I see," Castiel said, reading her thoughts once more. "I'm not a man, Meg. I don't have a seed."

"Oh."

Well, of course. Why hadn't she thought about that? It was stupid, but she had thought that in claiming her and all that there would be some sort of... exchange involved.

Castiel startled a little underneath her and moved away to look at her face.

"You thought this...? Meg, no. No, no. You can still leave. This was merely sex."

There was something strangely insulting about hearing him say that. She'd just had an epiphany while fucking him and he was talking about 'mere sex'?

"I didn't mean it like that," he said. It was his time to get flustered, and he did it so great it was actually hard to stay mad at him.

Meg made the effort anyway. She rolled away and glared at him from the other end of the bed.

"Well, you better fucking explain what you meant, then."

She had no idea what she would do if he refused to say otherwise. Leave the castle? Trek for God only knew how many miles of hostile mountains with below freezing temperature wearing just her nightgown? She was willing to try just to annoy him, though.

Castiel rubbed his face and extended a hand towards her. Reluctantly, Meg grabbed it and let him drag her closer to him again.

"Claiming you would require something even deeper, something that would absolutely severe every tie you have to your human life," he said. "Laying with you had nothing to do with that. This was... me being selfish."

Meg was irritated again, but this time for an entirely different reason.

"Goddammit."

"Please, don't blaspheme..."

"Goddammit!" she repeated even louder. "What exactly would take for me to convince you I really want to stay with you, you stupid, stupid... stupid Clarence?"

It wasn't her best insult, but at least it did of a great job at baffling him.

"I don't know who that is."

"Millions of years and you never even bothered to watch a movie?"

"I've watched movies before..."

"We're getting off subject," Meg interrupted him. "What do I have to do to for you to believe I am exactly where I want to be right here with you?"

Castiel played with her hair pensively. He stayed quiet for so long she was going to repeat the question, over and over until she got an answer if it was necessary, when his sad blue eyes fell on her face again.

"Would you do anything I ask you to?"

"Whatever it takes," Meg replied, not even thinking about the words coming out of her mouth.

"Then leave," he said. "Go back to your life, to your skating. Get drunk with your friends, find other lovers, form a family if you want that. And then, in fifty years or so, when you've done all that, when you're tired and ready to go, come back to me and I'll take you. And we'll ride the wind under the moonlight like we did tonight."

Meg let out a shaky breath. She refused to cry.

"No."

"It's the only way I won't feel like I'm stealing everything from you, Meg."

"Fifty years is too long."

"Not for me."

"Oh, sure, you won't grow old or anything like that," Meg said, rolling her eyes. “But I’m human. What if I die before I can come back?”

"Meg..."

"What if I'm too old or too frail to even come back? What if I get Alzheimer or something like that and I forget about you? What if I forget all about this?" she continued asking. "And what if you forget about me?"

"I could never forget you," he assured her, but now that the possibility had come to her mind, Meg simply couldn't let go of it.

"What if another cute girl or boy gets lost in your mountains?" she asked. "You wouldn't need me then."

She blinked fast, trying to disperse the tears gathering in her eyes. The possibility of never seeing him again was frightened beyond anything she could imagine, but she would be damned if she let him see that.

She failed spectacularly at hiding it. Castiel cupped her cheek with his hand and made her look at him.

"I could never forget you," he repeated. "And if another soul comes to me, I would tell them the same thing I'm telling to you. I want you to stay with me... but not at the cost of your life. Not if you're going to lose everything because of me."

"Lose what?" Meg asked, raising her voice. She was on the edge of screaming out loud, scratch him, slap him, do something. Why couldn't he understand there was nothing for her down there at all? Why couldn't he see...?

"The entire world is still yours to conquer, Meg," he corrected her, reading her thoughts again. "Are you really willing to give that up?"

The answer was still yes, but Meg knew she wasn't going to make him change his mind. He was as unmovable as the mountain.

"Still, fifty years is too long," she insisted. "One year. I'll come back in a year and..."

"That's too little," he interrupted her. "Twenty five years then. That's half of it, Meg. You'd still be young, you can still come back by your own means."

Meg let out a huff of frustration, but she still wasn't willing to accept that bargain.

"Ten years," she offered. She didn't know how she was going to wait that long. The mere idea of leaving him now was already torture and she didn't know if she could even survive that long without running to him again, but if it was the only way he would accept her staying with him, she was willing to try. "Not a day more, Castiel. For you that might seem like a short time, but many things can happen to humans in ten years. It's plenty of time to change my mind like you're so sure I will."

It was Castiel's turn to look infinitely frustrated.

"If you can't spend a few decades without me, how do you expect to spend an eternity with me?"

Meg looked at him again. She looked into his eyes as infinite as the sky, she touched his cheeks, his jawline, his neck. She wanted to touch every inch of him, memorize the texture of his skin like she had memorized his face and his voice.

"Because an eternity with you seems like a very short time in comparison."

Castiel breathed in deeply, like what Meg just said had sucked all the air out of him.

"Meg," he muttered, as he wiped her tears with his thumbs.

Meg kissed him to shut him up. She pressed her body against his and he understood what she wanted. He rolled them over, kissing her deeply, gently spreading her legs to take her again. Meg moaned underneath his weight. Yes, maybe he had to let her go for a while to keep his conscience clean, maybe once she was away from those mountains she would realize how insane all of that was.

But that night, they were allowed to be selfish and irrational.

 

* * *

 

There was a moment between the end of the night and the sun rise where the horizon looked like it had been set on fire. There shouldn’t be a sun so bright in winter. Then again, there shouldn’t be ice castles on the side of the mountain, there shouldn’t be a man or angel or spirit that made her feel like there was no impossibilities. Yet there he was, with an arm around her waist and his lips barely grazing her shoulder. Meg wanted to go back to sleep. To close her eyes and sink again in the comfort of his arms, but she already knew he wasn’t going to let her.

“Ten years,” he reminded her. “If you come back before that, I swear I won’t come to you, Meg. You might call me until your voice goes hoarse, but I won’t appear before you. If you…”

“Yes, yes,” Meg interrupted, groggily nudging the bicep she was using as a pillow. “I get it. But if you try to send me away again when I come back, I won’t leave. And I don’t care how many storms you send after me, I will stay right where I am and freeze.”

She expected him to tell her again that she was making a mistake, but instead, he chuckled, his breath tingling on her neck.

“I believe you.”

“But you still don’t believe I’ll come back at all, do you?”

He didn’t answer. Meg rolled over to look at his face. He looked sad again and she shuddered at the intensity of his gaze. Like he, too, was trying to memorize every aspect of her.

“Well, I’ll prove you wrong,” she promised.

The ghost of a smile crossed his lips. He leaned over and kissed bother her eyelids. They suddenly fell like they weighed a tone, so Meg closed them and nuzzled against Castiel, ready to sleep one more time.

“I love you.”

The words came from far away, far above her head. She sighed and took them in, she nestled them far in the back of her mind, hiding them like a treasure, like Castiel hid the portraits of all those he had loved and lost. She swore to herself she wasn’t going to forget those words. Whenever things got difficult or disheartening, whenever she was angry or lonely or lost, she would remember them.

And she would know he was waiting for her to come back home.

 

* * *

 

She woke up in her bed, back at the Snow Angels Hostel. There was no one by her side and the window was closed. For a second, for one terrible second, her rational mind tried to convince her it had all been just a dream, just a wonderful, wonderful dream, but no more lasting that the frost underneath the sun. But she ran to the bathroom and the mirror told her otherwise: her hair had turned almost completely white, with barely a few strands of black here and there. The mark of his kisses was still fresh on her neck and shoulders and she wished she could have them tattooed so they would never fade.

But they would and she knew it. She grabbed onto the sink, breathing in deeply.

“Ten years,” she muttered to herself. “That’s not a lot. It’s not a lot. I’ll come back, Castiel.”

The silent room offered her no response. She jumped in the shower and let the water run through her tired body while she carefully checked for the bruises of his fingerprints around her thighs, for any and every sign that the night before had been real.

After what felt like hours, she closed the water and stepped out, ready to face the real world beyond that room. They still had to stay another day until Sam’s fever pitched down, but it made no difference. She had already said her goodbyes to Castiel, and when she spoke to Amelia, she found out that he also hadn’t wanted to prolong it anymore.

“He left early this morning,” the owner told her. “It was kind of weird, because… well, he always stays for the season and he pays me in advance for his room. When I try to give him his money back, he wouldn’t take it. I don’t know, it was… it was unusual.”

Meg saw something moving out of the corner of her eye and realize it was Claire, spying on their conversation from behind the out of season Christmas tree.

“It’s okay,” she told her, when Amelia left to so something else. “We can talk.”

Claire slowly emerged from her hideout, staring at Meg with her enormous blue eyes. They weren’t quite the same shade as Castiel’s, but they were close enough that Meg felt a tug in her chest. She knelt in front of the girl so they could have that conversation face to face.

“Did you fight with him?” Claire asked, timidly. “Is that why he left?”

“No.” Meg shook her head. “No, we didn’t fight, but it’s… it’s a little more complicated than that, Claire. You know he’s not… he’s not what he appears to be.”

She wished she was making more sense, but the little girl still seemed to understand exactly what she meant.

“Will he be coming back?” she asked, with a scowl so serious it was almost comical in her little face.

“I don’t know. But I’m sure he won’t be far.”

“Will you be coming back?”

Meg didn’t want to lie to her. But she also didn’t want to explain to her just exactly how much more there was in the world than she could ever imagine.

“Yes,” she said, instead. “One day.”

Claire analyzed her face attentively, as if that way she could catch if Meg was telling her the truth or not. In the end, she nodded, satisfied with her discoveries.

“I’m going to miss him,” she confided in Meg.

“Me too.”

 

* * *

 

“Hey, are you okay? You look pale.”

Meg blinked, rudely yanked back to the bench of the bus station where she was waiting with Sam. She had been staring at the peaks, holding onto her suitcase as if it was an anchored that prevented her from breaking her promise, from running and climbing the rocks like a goat calling out for Castiel. Would he really keep his word? Would he really not come to her if she did that? Was it worth the risk?

“Of course I’m okay,” she lied. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“It’s just… you’ve been awfully quiet,” Sam explained. Meg continued looking at him in silence, so he elaborated: “Like, scary quiet, Meg. You’re never this… and your hair.”

“It doesn’t look half as bad,” Meg said, brushing one of her now silver locks and hooking it behind her ear. “Does it?”

“No, no, it doesn’t,” Sam replied, although there was the possibility he was only saying that to be polite. “But it’s… it’s kind of strange. Meg, did something happen while I was sick or out of town? Something I should know?”

Before Meg had to lie in his face, their bus pulled over in front of the station. She stood up with shaky knees. She could do this. Castiel wouldn’t send her away if he didn’t think she could do it, if he didn’t think she could survive being away from him. He wouldn’t be cruel to her just for the sake of it, he wouldn’t demand her to feel like her heart was being ripped from her chest if he wasn’t absolutely certain she could handle it.

Had she put away his sketchbook? It was the only palpable thing of him she had, the only thing he had given to her. She would never forgive herself if she had forgotten it…

“Meg?” Sam called out to her.

“I’m coming,” she said, but she was rooted to her spot. “Give me a sec.”

Sam didn’t move from where she was while she opened her suitcase, moved the clothes aside and breathed in relief when she found the leather-bound black sketchbook. She held it close to her chest as she just pushed everything else back in and closed it.

“Okay,” she said, standing up. “I’m ready.”

If Sam noticed her voice was about to break, that she pretty much sprinted towards the bus without looking back to wait for him, he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything as he handed their tickets to the driver, as he placed their suitcases on the compartment above. Meg kept her eyes glued to the window the entire time, her fingers tapping impatiently against the sketchbook.

Now that she had gathered her courage to do it, she wanted it to just be over. The wait was always worse, and once she’d left the Moonlit Heights behind, she could begin to find a way to spend the next decade.

The bus’ engine purred softly as they left the station. Meg continued looking out, holding her breath, her knuckles white from how tightly she was holding onto the sketchbook. The bus reached the road and for a moment, a very confusing moment, the sun play a trick on Meg’s eyes. She thought she saw a winged man flying right below the line of the perpetually grey clouds.

Then the bus gained velocity, took a curve and the Moonlight Heights disappeared around it.

Only then Sam called her out again, softly, as one would call a very frightened child.

Meg was always thankful to him because he never asked her why she sank her face on his chest and cried for several hours until she fell asleep.


	9. Chapter 9

Ten years was a long time. A lot could happen in ten years, and yet, not enough to make her change her mind.

The first year, Meg spent it staring at the world as if she had never seen it before. It looked surreal, blurry on the edges, like everything was a little off, a little just out of focus. She felt like she had fallen into a dreamland where not many things made sense for her. The only moments of clarity she had were very early in the morning, when the sun had barely come out and everything was under a very strange grey light. That light reminded her of Castiel. It reminded her of his ice castle and the starlight reflecting on its hallways.

She got used to it eventually, just as she got used to people commenting on her hair and on how cold her skin was. She laughed it off and said it was because of a condition she had developed, a condition that didn’t affect her much. And it was true: she soon found out she felt slightly dizzy and sick during the warmest days of summer, and manically energetic during the coldest days of winter. So on the second year, she officially retired from Olympic competition and moved up to a little town north of Vermont. For months she struggled with herself, thinking maybe she should just bid her time in Maine, but the temptation would be too great. She was perfectly fine with that fine state line between the two. She could wait. Sometimes she scanned the newspapers from the neighboring state, looking for any mention of mysterious rescues in the mountains of a small town called Moonlit Heights, but that was as far as she allowed her anxiety to go.

On the third year, she opened a school for figure skating. It was a great success. Little girl who were bored with ballet came to train with her and she even saw a couple of very young, promising teenagers. When they asked her to train them, she politely declined and recommended some of her old friends and coaches instead. One of the girls, Krissy, was very disappointed by her rejection.

“I just thought… I thought you said I was very good,” she protested.

“You are,” Meg said. “I’m sure you can do great things, Krissy. But you see, to help you shape your career would take a lot of time.”

Krissy was still sad, but she nodded comprehensively.

“I understand,” she said. “You don’t want to leave the school just to train me.”

That wasn’t exactly what Meg meant, but she let her think that. The truth was, even if she did train Krissy, at the end she wouldn’t be around to watch her triumph. In the end, she would have to leave the school anyway, and when she realized that, she made a resolution to hire someone she could leave it with.

So the following year, she hired a former ballet dancer called Sarah Blake, a good girl with a very charming smile. She had a four year old daughter named Bess who could barely stand in her skates, but try to imitate Meg’s movements anyway. She was adorable, a little bundle of black hair and green eyes who smiled shyly at all the adults she met.

“Why you never had children, Meg?” Sarah asked her one time.

Meg shrugged. She’d never wanted children. She figure they would put a dent in her career and if she had to choose, forming a family had never been a priority for her. She told that to Sarah, but she didn’t seem to quite believe her.

“I’ve seen you with the girls,” she told her. “You’re great with them. Bess adores you.”

That was also true. Only now she was finding out that she was good with them, she liked watching them learn, and fall on their butts, and get up and try again. But it was a bit too late for her: if she had a child, she would have to abandon them while they were still very young. Or she would have to give up Castiel forever, and she knew having to choose would simply tear her apart.

She offered another shrug, but Sarah wasn’t ready to let go of the topic.

“Why didn’t you settle down with a good guy when you retired?”

“I guess I never found the right person.”

Not for lack of trying. She listened to Castiel’s advice and took on lover after lover, brief relationships that never lasted more than just a few months. Not because she really wanted to, but because when she came back to Moonlit Heights she could tell Castiel she had tried, that she had tried to love someone else, she had tried to want to spend the remainder of her life with a human like her, and she had failed.

Most of the people she dated were decent, people who, like Sam, deserved better than being a consolation prize, than keeping her bed uncomfortably warm while being held against an impossible standard they could never even dream to compete against. After a few months, she let them go. She never broke up with them, but they all eventually left. They knew, on some level; that Meg was only pretending to be in love with them. That she belonged to someone else.

Cassie stayed for a year, Meg’s entire fifth year of waiting. She was a journalist and a writer, a great, smart girl with beautiful dark skin and curly hair. Meg liked to twist it around her fingers when they woke up together in the morning and Cassie liked to joke they must have looked like the ying and yang when they were sixty-nineing. She had a great sense of humor and she always make Meg laugh. And some afternoons, when she watched her in silence typing away in her laptop, her coffee mug smoking right beside her, Meg almost believed Cassie could convince her to stay.

“This guy must have done a number on you,” Cassie commented when Meg told her about a painter she had met in the mountains and the brief fling they’d had. She omitted a lot of other details, of course.

“What do you mean?” Meg asked, frowning.

“Well, even now, you’re with me, but you’re not really _with_ me,” Cassie explained. “It’s always like you’re a little far away, a little closed off. It just… it doesn’t matter, doll. You are who you are, and I love you, brokenhearted and all.”

Meg wished she hadn’t said that, because even when she did, she could hear Castiel’s voice echoing in the back of her mind. In the end (because she always knew it was going to end), Cassie fell in love with a redheaded girl named Charlie, an intern in her newspaper. When she tearfully confessed it to Meg, she didn’t hold it against her. They broke up with a hug at the door of Meg’s apartment, and once the door close behind her, Meg slid down on the floor and cried like she hadn’t since the day she’d left Moonlit Heights.

Through no fault of her own, she still kept contact with Sam. Sometimes he snuck out of his job in New York to visit her and they spend a weekend in bed, usually when Meg was in between relationships. He had tried to go back together with Jess, but when that had failed; he had fallen back on Meg once more. They had talked long and honestly about it this time. They both agreed they enjoyed their friendship and the sex, but that there could never be anything else between them.

“You never told me what happened to you,” he commented one time while they made dinner. It was no long after Meg had broken up with Cassie, and she started telling him about the redheaded intern when Sam shook his head: “I’m not talking about now. I’m talking about five years ago. Something happened to you on those mountains, Meg, don’t try to deny it. You were pretty shaken up.”

Meg placed the plates on the dinner and stared at Sam, wondering if he really would believe her.

“Nothing happened,” she lied. He didn’t look convince. “I found out where I belonged, that’s all.”

“Right. That explains everything,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“Sarcasm’s not attractive on you, beefcake,” Meg teased him.

It wasn’t the first time she felt the impulse to tell him the truth, all of the truth. But some of those secrets weren’t hers to tell, and others… well, she wasn’t sure Sam would believe them.

One afternoon, Sam came to look for her at the skating school. By pure chance, he happened upon Sarah and Bess, who were leaving right then. When Meg came out, Sam was talking amicable with Sarah and making funny faces at Bess to make her laugh. Meg knew that Sam’s failure to make things work with Jess still hurt him and Sarah had had an ugly divorce with Bess’ dad. They had every reason to be bitter and to never want to love again. But the moment she saw them together, Meg knew right away that they had also found where they belonged.

Sarah asked Meg to be the maid of honor on their wedding the following year.

The last two years before her time was up, Meg travelled as much as she could. She visited shores, small towns at the edges of woods, lakes so deep they were like seas, more lonely mountains no one dared to climb. She looked for places that had been barely been touched by humans, places where Castiel’s siblings might live. She didn’t know why suddenly she felt the impulse to look for them. Maybe because she almost feared that if she didn’t return to Moonlit Heights in time, she would forget everything about Castiel. Even though now the images of him, of his palace, his voice, his eyes, were more pristine than anything else in Meg’s memory, she feared she would start to forget, that she might start seeing him like she saw everything else: like a dream she could only remember bits and pieces upon waking up, or something far away seen underwater.

She found two of them, or at least, she thought she did. One was on a cruise ship, during a storm. She thought she saw a dark skinned man dancing above the restless waves, his arms extended towards the angered sky. The lightning formed skeletal wings that spread from his back. She only saw it for a second, and then a member of the crew reminded her that the captain had ordered all passengers should go under the deck until after the tempest had passed. Meg kept looking at the waves the following days, but didn’t see the man again.

The other was on a trip to the Grand Canyon. She suffered immensely from the Arizona heat and had to keep a cool pad underneath her shirt the entire time, but she managed. Her group of tourist stopped to take pictures and selfies at the edge of it, but Meg noticed immediately a girl in a yellow dress who wasn’t doing anything of the sort. She simple stood around, her black hair waving in the wind, her eyes fixed on the sun for longer than was humanly possible. She looked young enough that she should have been accompanied by someone, yet she made no effort to follow the group when they’d moved on.

Meg approached her very slowly, like she was a frightful animal that would start running if Meg made any sudden movements.

The girl suddenly turned her face at her and Meg was shocked to discover that her eyes were exactly the same shade of Castiel’s.

“You,” the girl said, surprised. “You can see me?”

“Yes,” Meg replied.

She wanted to talk to this girl, she wanted to tell her about Castiel and ask her many things. The girl simply grabbed her hand (her touch was almost fire against Meg’s skin), held it for a moment and nodded, as if that had told her everything she needed to know about her.

“Will you tell Castiel about this place?” she asked Meg, “Will you tell him Hael still walks the earth like him and remembers him with love?”

“I’ll tell him,” Meg promised.

The girl smiled at her. Meg blinked and she thought she heard a flutter of wings. When she looked again, the girl was gone. A flock of black birds flew over her head towards the sun.

 

* * *

 

On her ninth year, Meg put all her businesses in order. She revised the school’s contract so Sarah could have as much power as her once she was gone, she secretly made a testament so all her belongings would go to her and Sam. She didn’t have much: she had blown up most of her savings on her travels, she had never bought a house and she didn’t think her old beaten car would be worth all that much to them. But they were the closest thing she had to a family and she was going to miss them. She was going to miss her girls skating on the ice like spirits of the air. Despite all her best efforts, she had formed some attachments during that decade after all.

She had dinner with them the night before she travelled to Moonlit Heights. They bored her to death with pictures of Bess’ school play where she was a tree, and they showed her the macaroni art Robert, their two years old son, had made. Bess sat by her side on the dinner table and asked her a lot of questions as always:

“Where are you going this time, Aunt Meg?”

“I’m actually going back to a place where I had been before,” Meg told her. “I’m going to see an old friend.”

Bess looked at her with extreme seriousness. As always, little kids knew more than adults could even imagine.

“Are you going to come back?”

“Of course she’s going to come back, Bess,” Sarah told her daughter. “What kind of question is that?”

Meg didn’t want to make any comments about it. She, Sarah and Sam drank a lot of wine after they sent the kids to bed.

“I’m really sorry about that,” Sarah told her as she filled her glass again. “Recently the classroom’s Guinea pig died, so now she’s dealing with the fact that we’re all mortals and stuff.”

“It’s understandable,” Meg said.

It was also understandable that Sam walked her down the street to catch a cab and looked at her with intense worry.

“You’re really going back to Moonlit Heights? After all these years?”

“Why not?” Meg shrugged. “Is there a law against it or something?”

Sam kept staring at her, his mouth twisted in a gesture of disagreement.

“Meg, what happened in those mountains?”

Meg pretended she hadn’t heard the question and hailed a cab. She turned to him and suddenly the reality that it was the last time she saw her best friend hit her like a freight train. But she wasn’t going to cry. Castiel had warned her that would be the price to pay and she had accepted it long ago.

“Goodbye, Sam,” she said, her hand lingering in her cheek a little too long for him not to suspect there was something else going on. “Take good care of them,” she added, jerking her face towards the house he had bought for Sarah.

“Meg…” he started saying, but she opened the taxi’s door and slid inside before he could add anything else.

 

* * *

 

The Snow Angels Hostel hadn’t changed. In fact, very few things seemed to have changed in Moonlit Heights during the last decade. Meg noticed the same diner, the same snowed streets, the same bookstore where she had got all those trashy novels she never finished reading. But the Snow Angels Hostel seemed frozen in time. The façade had been repainted of the exact same color, and the interior still smelled of wood and smoke. There was even a Christmas tree in the corner even though, again, it was the middle of January.

The only indication that any time had passed was that now there was a blonde teenage girl behind the reception’s desk, with her combat boots propped up on it. She was reading a book with a cover that was completely black except for the drops of blood sliding down from the title and the author’s name. She had earphones on and the music was so loud that Meg could hear the rumor of an angry guitar pulsating from it.

“Excuse me,” she said. The girl ignored her. “Excuse me!” Meg repeated a little louder.

The girl glowered at her with blue eyes surrounded by what seem like pounds and pounds of black eyeliner and plucked her earphones out.

“Yes?” she asked, crooking an eyebrow at her.

Meg almost didn’t want to ask, but she needed confirmation to believe what she was seeing.

“You’re… Claire? Claire Novak?”

“I happen to be,” Claire shrugged and took her boots off the desk. “Do you need anything?”

Meg almost wanted to grab her and ask her ‘ _Holy shit, what happened to you, kid?_ ’, but instead she kept a deadpan face.

“I have a reservation,” she said. “Megan Masters.”

Claire turned on a laptop she had right by her (apparently, they’d got rid of the old computer and had installed Wi-Fi at some point) and typed something on it.

“Yep, you’re here,” she confirmed. “I’m going to need and ID and your credit card. Or are you paying cash?”

Meg put her credit on the desk. She wasn’t going to have to pay the bill after all. Claire processed her information and printed a form for her to sign. She kept eyeing her the entire time Meg was filling it.

“How do I know you?” she asked in the end, her curiosity apparently greater than her need to maintain a cool and detached demeanor.

“I stayed here like… forever ago,” Meg said, not wanting to confess the following day would be exactly ten years. “You were like, this tall,” she added, signaling the height of the desk, even though Claire had been even shorter than that.

“Oh, yeah, the skater!” Claire exclaimed, and for a second there, there was a glimmer in her eye that made her seemed like that hyperactive little girl again. “You taught me and Jo Harvelle how to make spins on the ice.”

“Exactly.” Meg smiled. “Does Jo still live here?”

“No, she went to college and afterwards she moved to Augusta. She comes back on the summers,” Claire explained.

“I see,” Meg said. “And does Bobby Singer still drive the van all the way up to the lake.”

“Uh, Mr. Singer passed a few years ago. Heart attack,” Claire replied. She was starting to look slightly comfortable with all that chit chat now, but Meg needed to know anyway. “Donna Hanscum, Jody… I mean, Ranger Mills’ wife does the trips to the lake now.”

“No kidding,” Meg said. She decided to ask what she really wanted know now before she lost the teenager’s attention. “And what about Castiel?”

It was the first time in ages that she pronounced his name out loud, and it almost felt like it tickled on her tongue.

Claire narrowed her eyes. “Cas who now?”

“Castiel,” Meg repeated. “He was a painter? He stayed here at the same time I did… you two seemed to be close.”

Claire shook her head. “Sorry. Doesn’t ring any bells.”

“But…” Meg started to argue, and then she realized there was no point. Claire had grown up. She could no longer know what she had known then. It was sad, but there was nothing Meg could do about it. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll just… go to my room now.”

“Okay, yeah, you do that,” Claire said, handing her the key. “My mom says I should wish you a good stay,” she added, with a smile that could not have looked more forced.

“You should listen to your mom or she could fire you,” Meg replied.

Her next stop was the lake. Much like the hostel, there didn’t seem to be many things that had changed. The only notable difference, of course, was Bobby’s absence. The woman who currently drove the van was the exact opposite of him: Donna was a literal ray of sunshine, all smiles and helpfulness to go around.

“And you mind that step, now, we wouldn’t want you to fall and hurt your head!” she warned Meg as she climbed out of the van. “What are you hoping to do today, ma’am? Oh, I see you have your blades on you. You want me to see you to the part of the lake designated for skating?”

“That’s okay,” Meg said, trying to stay out of reach of her helpfulness. “I know where it is, thank you.”

“Okie dokie, call me if you need anything!” she said in a singsong tone.

Meg stepped on the ice with the same excitement as the first time she was there. She looked up at the branches, at the peaks, and resisted the urge to call out for him. He was punctual and meticulous. He wouldn’t come until that night. She slid on the ice, closing her eyes and letting the motion carry her forwards. When she was young she had been so obsessed with perfection, with putting on a show for people to admire. Now she was in her mid-thirties and her joints weren’t what they used to. She could still demonstrate a couple of complicated figures for the crowd of little girl who were more concerned with wearing pretty dresses that with skating, but the days where she could have won an Olympic medal in her sleep were long behind her.

She still enjoyed the feeling in her limbs, the breeze in her hair. She executed a couple of jumps, for herself, for old times’ sake, and smiled to herself in the privacy of her little, isolated space. When she looked to the bench, she thought she saw a figure of a man sitting there, observing her. She blinked and he was gone, but Meg decided to tease him about it later.

The ice didn’t give in underneath her this time, and there was no storm hurrying her to come back, so she skated until her muscles ached, until the sun started setting behind the trees and Donna started calling up for the group to come back.

The hostel’s lobby looked a lot more crowded than it ever had when Meg and Sam had stayed there: there were at least half a dozen guests chatting up and drinking and playing games. Meg was glad for it. She would have felt really bad for Amelia if her only guest were to disappear into the night leaving her with a lot of questions. Then again, there was the possibility that all traces of her would vanish and they would forget about her like they had forgotten about Castiel, because Amelia didn’t remember him either. Meg asked her about him when she approached her to offer her a mug of hot cocoa.

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t think so,” she said. “I remember your boyfriend, though, I remember he was very ill for a couple of days… how is he, by the way?”

Meg gave her a quick summary of what had become of Sam’s life. The same pang of pain reappeared in her chest and she wondered if she should call him that night. But he was already going to be baffled and maybe even angry with her when she didn’t return, so there was no need to rub salt in the wound.

She sat next to Claire, who peered at her over the edge of her book.

“I figured this was the reading section,” Meg said, showing her what she was reading.

Claire ignored for about ten minutes before putting the book down again.

“Hey… I think I remembered the guy you talked to me about,” she said. “I don’t remember his face or anything, but… I think he confused Santa Claus with the Tooth Fairy?”

“Yeah,” Meg confirmed. “He wasn’t all that savvy in pop culture.”

Claire showed her a grin. Perhaps she wasn’t as far gone into the path of cynic adulthood as Meg had thought.

Some of the guests moved to the dining room when Amelia announced the food was ready, but Meg simply closed her book and headed for the stairs. She wasn’t hungry. As midnight came closer, she knew she would turn more and more into a nervous wreck. She wouldn’t exactly be a great company that night.

“Hey,” Claire called her when she was in the middle of the stairs. Meg turned to look at her. “I, uh…”

She fidgeted with the edge of her flannel shirt and Meg understood. Claire was sensing the change of air in the night. She knew something was going to happen with Meg or to Meg, but it had been so many years since she had just allowed herself to believe in those things, now she didn’t know how to do it.

The same thing had happened to her when she’d first seen Castiel again after all those years.

“Good luck, Claire,” Meg told her. There was really nothing else she could say to her at that moment.

“Yeah,” Claire said, awkwardly. “To you too.”

She would be fine, Meg told herself as she closed the door behind her. She had peeked onto the other side, on the side where angels and spirits were real, like maybe all children did at some point, but she would forget again soon enough.

Meg would never forget. And that was why she couldn’t be part of the same world as Claire, as Sam and Sarah.

No. She belonged to Castiel.

She had bought a white lace nightgown with a low neckline and a long skirt for the occasion. It wasn’t quite as elegant as the dress Castiel had drawn her wearing all those years ago, but it would do. She almost felt like a bride in it, a blushing virgin bride sitting on the bed, waiting for the clock to strike twelve. It was a ridiculous idea and she laughed hard at it. She laughed because for the first time in ten years, she felt cold again, for the first time in ten years, her head felt light and clear and her heart beat without a hesitation.

And she knew she was exactly where she needed to be.

At twelve o’ clock, her window burst open and the snowflakes flurried inside, dancing and spinning, slowly forming the shape of a man who became more and more visible with every step he took towards her. Meg stood up and waited until he was standing in front of her again, ethereal and real, and with that same look of desperate desire upon his face.

And all her lovers, all her past life disappeared into his eyes as he embraced her.

“You’re here,” he said. There was a tinge of amazement in his voice, as if he still didn’t think that was possible, and Meg couldn’t help but to laugh.

“I’m here,” she confirmed, throwing her arms around his neck. “And you can kick and scream all you want. I’m not going anywhere again.”

Castiel didn’t do such thing. Instead, he held her tight against him and leaned over to kiss her with the same fierceness, with the same possessiveness she remembered. She sank her nails in his scalp and took it all in, she took his coldness and his passion and his mystery.

Her snow white king.

Castiel smiled at her when they broke apart and she laughed again, elated and happy as he took her into her arms and carried her to the window once more. A round full moon shone over them, and Meg contemplated his kingdom in the silver pale light.

“Are you ready?” he whispered in her ear.

“I’ve always been.”

Castiel took a single step forwards. They rode away on the wind.


End file.
